CyberGuy offers some hack prevention tips for credit and bank cards. A Somerset, Kentucky, man was sentenced to prison after hacking state registry systems to fake his own death in order to avoid paying child support. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said 39-year-old Jesse Kipf was sentenced to 81 months on Monday for computer fraud and aggravated identity theft. Kipf is accused of hacking state systems in Hawaii, Arizona and Vermont, in addition to two private companies, GuestTek Interactive Entertainment, which provides internet access at hotels, and Milestone Inc., a marketing company, according to federal court documents. In January 2023, when Kipf owed his California ex over six-figures, federal prosecutors say Kipf obtained the credentials of a doctor, logged into the Hawaii Death Registry System and created a case file for his own premature end.

In The Future of Violence, Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum discuss a disturbing hypothetical scenario. A lone actor in Nigeria, "home to a great deal of spamming and online fraud activity," tricks women and teenage girls into downloading malware that enables him to monitor and record their activity, for the purposes of blackmail. The real story involved a California man who the FBI eventually caught and sent to prison for six years, but if he had been elsewhere in the world he might have gotten away with it. Many countries, as Wittes and Blum note, "have neither the will nor the means to monitor cybercrime, prosecute offenders, or extradite suspects to the United States." Technology is, in other words, enabling criminals to target anyone anywhere and, due to democratization, increasingly at scale.