Alleged ShinyHunters member returned to France after prison in the U.S., now facing French charges

On January 9, 2024, DataBreaches reported that French national Sébastien Raoult had been sentenced in a Seattle federal court, but might be out in 11 months.  As a suspected member of ShinyHunters, Raoult (aka “Sezyo Kaizen”) had been extradited to the U.S. after being detained in Morocco on his way home to France from a vacation. As DataBreaches reported at the time, Raoult pleaded guilty to Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud and Aggravated Identity Theft in a plea deal. He was sentenced to 36 months in prison: 12 months for the conspiracy to commit wire fraud charge and 24 months to be served after that for the aggravated identity theft charge.  Based on normal practices, DataBreaches calculated that Raoult might be out and on supervised release in about 10 months from January.

Now it appears that he is out of U.S. prison — but not for supervised release.  Stephane Sellami reports that Raoult is now back in France and was to be before a judge. The charges he may be facing in France are not known to DataBreaches at this time, but Le Monde reports that France might be charging Raoult with having participated in the sale, in the years 2021-2022, of software to scan the vulnerabilities of email servers (SMTP) of the digital giant Amazon Web Services in order to then take control of them.

Philippe Ohayon, Raoult’s defense lawyer who was very active in trying to fight the unsuccessful extradition to the U.S., told Paris Match:  “After having sacrificed him to the American justice system, which fortunately took things in its stride and understood the abnormality of this situation, now the French justice system has issued an arrest warrant, as if it were welcome. We had filed a complaint for high treason a year ago.”

So it seems Raoult may be facing more jail time. Whether any of the other alleged co-conspirators who were questioned in July 2022 and then released might also be facing charges is unknown, but it appears that Raoult may still be the only alleged member of ShinyHungers the French government has actively tried to prosecute.

Extensive previous coverage by this site on Raoult’s case can be found linked from here.

This post was updated post-publication to add link to Le Monde coverage.