OM demands prison for two who stole data 30,000 NLE and Budget Energy customers

The Public Prosecution Service demands 12 months in prison, 4 of which are conditional, for two 23-year-old men from Zaandam who stole personal and bank details of more than 30,000 customers of NLE and Budget Energie. The stolen data was resold.

The two are suspected of having logged into the company network of Nuts Groep, parent company of the energy companies NLE and Budget Energie. Nuts Groep filed a report in November 2019, after it turned out that about 30,000 energy contracts signed by customers had been stolen.

These contracts contained personal details and bank account numbers. Photos of these contracts were sold through Telegram. An investigation showed that the data was stolen via accounts of ‘a number of’ Nuts Groep employees. The police investigated these accounts and found that the two 23-year-old suspects had logged in via IP addresses. One of these men worked for Nuts Groep.

The police suspect that the two suspects logged into the Nuts Groep network, often outside working hours, and thus stole the data. According to the police, the suspects did this via their own Nuts Groep account that they had because one of the suspects worked at the company, but also with accounts of colleagues. How they gained access to these accounts is not clear. Police say they misused “login credentials provided in good faith”.

It is not clear how much money the pair made from their alleged activities. The Public Prosecution Service demands twelve months in prison, of which four months conditional. With that conditional prison sentence, the Public Prosecution Service wants a probationary period of three years.