A group of teenagers from Indonesia, along with a 27-year-old, managed to hack Tiket.com, one of the most popular online travel ticket sites in Indonesia, and steal airline tickets worth $300,000.
The hackers then sold the stolen tickets on Facebook and used the money to buy themselves expensive motorcycles!
In November last year, Global Network, the company behind Tiket.com, reported the case to the police when it suspected that someone was illegally accessing the site and stealing tickets that had been issued for the low-cost airline, Citilink Indonesia.
"The perpetrators gained access to the Citilink server using an account belonging to Global Network from October 11 to 20, 2016," said Fadil Imran, director of the cybercrime department at the National Police Criminal Investigation Unit (Bareskrim).
Confessing to the crime, the group’s leader, Sultan Haikal, 19, told Motherboard that he used the money to buy a Ducati and other things. However, he did not invest the money in anything else. The hackers named their group “Gangtengers Crew.”
The four members of the Gangtengers Crew could face up to 12 years in prison for their actions, but Haikal has managed to impress Indonesian authorities with his hacking skills.
The group has successfully hacked several other sites, including this one from the National Police Department, but not all of them are for profit. The heists have yielded profits of $45,000.
According to Citilink, a subsidiary of Garuda Indonesia, none of its customers' personal information was compromised by the hack and the breach was limited to the electronic medium. Tiket.com was also able to recover $142,546.
