February 15, 2001

8:46 AM

Tales of unmitigated stupidity.Some people belong in jail because it's not safe for them to be left alone in public. (What's the law in the UK for dealing with a minor committing a crime like extortion? In the US, this guy would probably be tried as an adult.)
posted by Steven Den Beste (7 comments total)

I wonder how they calculated the damage the kid did; £20,000 is a lot of money.
posted by tranquileye at 1:33 PM on February 15, 2001

Lost time. He crashed e-mail servers, which means that people weren't able to get e-mail and therefore were able to actually do work rather than laughing at Mastercard parodies, but that productivity burst was counteracted by the time the administrators had to spend rebooting the servers, and the 50 hours the tech support desk had to say "Yes, the e-mail servers are down. No, you aren't able to get e-mail." then "Yes, the e-mail servers are back up. I'll reset your password to 'password' then."
posted by cCranium at 2:55 PM on February 15, 2001

Steven, IANAL but the age of criminal responsibility over here is 17, until that point children cannot be tried as adults (there may well be exceptions - I'm not great on juvenile law).
It's unlikely this will come to anything severe for the kid, the legal costs of proving that he cost them £20,000 (plus the publicity) probably means it won't go to court, so he'll probably get a caution or a fine under the Computer Misuse Act.

posted by Markb at 4:39 AM on February 16, 2001

Steven, IANAL but the age of criminal responsibility over here is 17, until that point children cannot be tried as adults (there may well be exceptions - I'm not great on juvenile law).
It's unlikely this will come to anything severe for the kid, the legal costs of proving that he cost them £20,000 (plus the publicity) probably means it won't go to court, so he'll probably get a caution or a fine under the Computer Misuse Act.

posted by Markb at 4:39 AM on February 16, 2001

Shit, sorry. Help me Doublepostguy.....
posted by Markb at 4:40 AM on February 16, 2001

Well, here's another idiot whose age won't keep him from prison.
posted by crunchland at 8:28 AM on February 16, 2001

Markb: not quite. You're a "young adult" at 14 in the UK, which gives you plenty of criminal responsibility. (In fact, the age can be lowered to 12 in certain cases.)

The police caution probably scared the shit out of him (from the experience of friends, it's meant to) and goes on the record. And my guess is that the civil courts will be happy to hand him a bill for the damage caused by his mischief.
posted by holgate at 9:50 AM on February 16, 2001