How did a teenager become the UK’s biggest cyber criminal?

Beyond Today

BBC

News

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 9 April 2019

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This is the story of Zain Qaiser. A student who made hundreds of thousands of pounds blackmailing porn users with cyber attacks from his parents’ house in East London. He spent almost £5,000 on a Rolex watch, £2,000 on a stay in a Chelsea hotel and £70,000 in a shopping centre casino. Today he was jailed for more than six years. But for every Zain there’s a Fabian. Fabian Wosar destroys the kind of ransomware that Zain Qaiser used to extort money. Fabian is so successful that cyber gangs leave threatening messages for him in their code to try and scare him off. The BBC’s Dominic Casciani and Joe Tidy take us into the murky world of cyber criminals and the hero hackers trying to stop them. Producer: Duncan Barber Mixed by Weidong Lin Editor: Harriet Noble

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:06.6	Hello, I'm Matthew Price.
0:08.6	This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4.
0:11.0	Every day we ask one big question about one big story.
0:17.0	Today how did a teenager become the UK's biggest cyber criminal?
0:27.0	Nobody knows how much money Zane Kaser has made, but investigators think it's in the millions.
0:38.0	He made his money by hacking computers, and he's now been jailed for more than six years.
0:43.0	We're going to find out how he did it,
0:45.0	and we're going to meet someone,
0:46.5	on the other side of the cyber warfare story,
0:49.0	a guy called Fabian who's making a lot of money
0:52.0	sitting at home on his computer stopping the hackers.
0:55.0	We're going to start with the BBC correspondent Dominic Cashioni, who was in court when Britain's biggest cyber criminal was sentenced.
1:04.0	Well, Zankaz is 24 years old.
1:06.0	He is a university dropout.
1:08.0	He was doing a degree in computer science here in London
1:11.0	at the time of all this was going on lived at home with his mom and sister in
1:16.2	barking out in East London sort of Essex way but in effect he had this incredibly
1:21.5	elaborate secret existence which he'd built up.
1:24.6	It started from his late teens, which basically turned him into one of the most serious cyber offenders who's yet been caused anywhere in the world and certainly
1:34.3	interviewed the national crime agency, you know, the most significant here in the UK.
1:38.9	The weird thing it's about, when you see these cyber guys in court, this is like the third case I've done, big cyber case, they just
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.