Joe Tidy reports:
An 18-year-old hacker who leaked clips of a forthcoming Grand Theft Auto (GTA) game has been sentenced to an indefinite hospital order.
Arion Kurtaj from Oxford, who has autism, was a key member of international gang Lapsus$.
The gang’s attacks on tech giants including Uber, Nvidia and Rockstar Games cost the firms nearly $10m.
The judge said Kurtaj’s skills and desire to commit cyber crime meant he remained a high risk to the public.
He will remain at a secure hospital for life unless doctors deem him no longer a danger.
Read more at BBC. An earlier version of BBC’s headline created some confusion with some readers thinking Kurtaj had received a life sentence in a hospital. That is not the case. When defendants with severe mental illness cannot stand trial, they are sentenced to a hospital setting — and not just because they need treatment. Such prisoners often have more behavioral and disruptive issues and require more intensive supervision. When defendants are sentenced to a hospital and not a regular prison, some members of the public may think they are getting off lightly. They are not, and some may wind up being confined for longer than they would have been if they had been able to stand trial and be sentenced to a regular prison.
So might Artaj wind up spending the rest of his life in a hospital setting? It’s possible, but unlikely. It depends on whether he gets any real treatment and/or learns how to manage his symptoms and urges — or at least fake it so that he convinces doctors he is no longer a threat.