Canadian authorities unlikely to prosecute Paddy Power data hacker

The person responsible for stealing information relating to 649,055 Paddy Power customers is unlikely to face criminal prosecution. Instead, Canadian authorities have said the case is a civil matter and also declined to identify the individual.

The Irish bookmaker said the full extent of the 2010 hacking episode became known to the company in recent months when it took legal action with the assistance of the Ontario Provincial Police to retrieve the compromised dataset.

Following a verification process on a sample of data, they sought and received two court orders to seize the man’s IT assets, recover and delete records, examine his bank accounts, other financial transactions, and question him. The court orders were secured and executed in Canada during the second week of July.

While the historical dataset did not contain customers’ financial information such as credit or debit card details, individual customer’s names, usernames, addresses, email addresses, phone contact numbers, dates of birth and prompted questions and answers were recorded.

Paddy Power has yet to comment on the latest development.