Stealing flight booking data
Le Minh Tuan hacked into the airline ticket booking data system, stole flight status information to build his own website and charge access fees.
On March 18, defendant Tuan, 41 years old, and accomplice Dang Thi Tuyet Trinh, 34 years old, were sentenced by the Hanoi People's Court to 15 and 12 months of suspended imprisonment, respectively, for the crime ofIllegal entryinto another person's computer network, telecommunications network or electronic media, according to point c, clause 2, article 289, Penal Code.
Defendant Tuan worked as a subordinate agent of a level 1 agent selling airline tickets since 2008 and began programming and writing software to support these agents since 2013. During this process, Tuan used the accounts of the data system to book and reserve seats for Vietnam Airlines (SABE), but was limited to basic information: searching for ticket prices, booking and changing reservations, and viewing the agent's unflown customers.
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| Defendants Tuan and Trinh at the trial on March 18. Photo: Trinh Tuan |
The indictment determined that, since 2017, realizing that ticket agents needed to view information beyond the agents' access rights, Tuan had the intention to commit a crime.
In early 2018, the defendant obtained an account with higher access rights, was able to view more information on SABE, and then built a website to post the stolen information.
Here, agents can view the number of available seats, prices for each ticket class, the number of seats booked but not yet paid for, cancellation times of rival agents... thereby gaining the opportunity to buy cheap tickets.
Users had to pay 500-2,000 VND for each visit, deposited directly into the defendant Trinh's bank account. From February 1 to 24, 2018, there were more than 609,000 visits to this website, averaging more than 25,000 visits per day. The amount transferred to Trinh's account was more than 600 million VND.
Of these 609,000 visits, 248,000 were requests to view information from Vietnam Airlines with a total fee of 247 million VND, the rest were requests to view information from Vietjet Air.
By obtaining customer information, Tuan impersonated a business class customer to accumulate points, redeem bonus miles, and convert them into 66 domestic airline tickets, worth 170 million VND.
At the trial, the two defendants admitted their actions, realized that their actions violated the law, and asked for leniency. Tuan said that an officer gave him the account. However, this person said that he did not own it and did not give it to him.
Vietnam Airlines said that this account was managed by a Cambodian employee working at a branch in this country. After discovering the violation, the account was locked.
Defendant Tuan paid 170 million VND to compensate for the consequences to Vietnam Airlines, even though this unit did not request compensation.
