In a plot worthy of “Money Heist”, it turns out that a bunch of inmates over at a correctional facility in Ihado were able to hack prison tablets and steal a hefty sum of money. We’re talking about $225,000 and we have details about it below.
The plot was pretty widespread involving 364 prison inmates from Idaho, which were involved in hacking the prison’s tablets and stealing the quarter of million dollars. They did that by transferring money into their own accounts, so not anything fancy. Those were JPay tablets, which can be used by prison inmates all over USA, for regular tasks, like music, email and games.
The jailbirds were able to find a way to exploit a vulnerability within JPay and increased their JPay account balances. Some of the inmates topped their accounts with $1000 and of them was greedier, at $10,000 the largest amount which was moved around. This wasn’t an accident, but rather intentional behaviour. You had to really know the JPay system and perform multiple actions for every inmate in order to properly get the credits.
JPay managed to recover about $65,000 of that sum and also suspended transactions for inmates for music and game downloads, till everything is cleared and the firm is compensated. Of course those caught have been sanctioned and privileges have been lost. This raises the topic of inmate tablet use again, as some of them have been caught gaming the system in the past, accessing adult sites and other services they shouldn’t have.
