A former U.S. soldier has been sentenced to over five years in prison and was ordered to pay nearly $300,000 in fines for conspiring to hack into telecommunications companies’ databases to access sensitive records.
According to a Department of Justice (DOJ) press release, Cameron John Wagenius, 22, intended to use the information to extort companies for ransom or sell it to other cybercriminals.
According to the DOJ, in November of 2024, Wagenius made two online posts that disclosed stolen confidential non-content call detail records belonging to a government official and family members of another former official and threatened to release additional confidential records unless paid a ransom.
The department said in a release Friday the text of one of these online posts suggested that Wagenius was motivated by a desire to retaliate for the then-recent arrest of another cybercriminal.
“Cameron Wagenius spent more than a year and a half betraying the trust placed in him as an active-duty soldier by carrying out a sweeping cybercrime campaign,” Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division wrote in the press release.