When many people think about high-tech crime, they picture people sitting in front of several computer screens in a dark room and bashing away on their keyboard. Sadly for society, criminals do not share most people’s lack of imagination when they think about possible crimes. Hacking is certainly one of the forms that high-tech crime can take, but ambitious yet ill-intentioned individuals have come up with all kinds of more creative ones.
Almost every step forward in science and technology can be used for evil, and now that it is easier than ever to find information, many have been. From 3D printing to a financial flash crash, here are ten high-tech crimes that did not involve hacking.
Related: 10 Most Lucrative Art Crimes in History
10 Creating a Hybrid Sheep
Table of Contents
There really is nothing usual about the case of Arthur “Jack” Schubarth of Vaughn, Montana. To start with, he was 81 years old when he was sentenced to six months in federal prison for his crime in 2024. In his long life up to that point, he had no criminal history at all. And then there is his crime itself: illegally importing a Marco Polo sheep—the largest breed of sheep in the world—so that he could clone it and create an even larger hybrid breed to sell to game reserves.
Schubarth was the owner of an “alternative livestock” business that sold unusual ungulates to hunting reserves, and it seems that at some point, the thought crossed his mind that nothing could be more alternative than a unique new animal. Using tissue and testicles from the Marco Polo sheep, he created the Montana Mountain King. Unfortunately for him, the U.S. authorities did not take kindly to him trying to “change the genetic makeup of the creatures” on the planet. Despite his lawyer arguing that nobody else can clone a sheep the way he had, the judge gave him jail time to deter others from trying.[1]
9 Crypto Mining on Public Money
Back in 2021, Christopher Naples dreamed of becoming one of the newly minted crypto millionaires who were starting to appear. As an IT supervisor with two decades of experience, he had the technical knowledge to do it. He also had a plan, which was to mine crypto coins at the Suffolk County Clerk’s Office, where he worked. Crypto mining consumes vast amounts of energy and can be very costly, so Naples decided to let the taxpayer foot the bill.
Over seven months, he hid 46 crypto-mining devices around his workplace. Police eventually found devices in six different rooms, hidden under floorboards, in server racks, and even in wall panels. His devices raised the temperature in some rooms by up to 20 degrees, and each one cost an estimated $4,200 per month in electricity bills. When his scheme was uncovered, Naples was charged with public corruption, third-degree grand larceny, computer trespass, and official misconduct. The first three are felonies, and public corruption alone can carry a sentence of up to 15 years.[2]
8 Causing a Global Financial Crash
Naples’s seven months of mining probably never earned him as much as Navinder Sarao. The London-based trader is believed to have made around $40 million in just five years, but strangely, he still lived in his parents’ house and bought no luxuries with his money. To him, financial markets were like a video game to try and win, but Sarao’s winning method was market manipulation. He used special software to place thousands of fake orders on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange which tricked other traders’ software into responding with their own orders.
They usually all responded the same way, quickly pushing prices up or down. Once it had set where the price was going, Sarao’s software placed his real order for a quick profit. The end came one day in 2010 when Sarao’s spoofs caused $1 trillion to be wiped off of the value of U.S. stocks in less than an hour. The brief panic became known as the “Flash Crash.” He was arrested five years later and extradited to the U.S. after four months in a UK prison. During this short prison stint, he helped catch other market fraudsters, allowing him to avoid further jail time.[3]
7 Fake President Phone Calls
Schubarth’s complex sheep-hybrid crime also landed him a $20,000 fine, but that is a tiny amount compared to the six million dollars that Steve Kramer was ordered to pay a few weeks earlier. So, what kind of complicated crime justifies that kind of money? The answer is one that is not very complicated at all. Instead of doing something nobody else could, like Schubarth, Kramer’s was a crime that anybody could commit.
The political consultant used AI to recreate the voice of U.S. President Joe Biden and then used it in phone calls to try and influence voters. Kramer was working for one of Biden’s 2024 challengers in an upcoming Democratic primary at the time, and he used the fake phone calls to ask New Hampshire voters not to vote in it.
The huge fine was ordered by the Federal Communications Commission for breaking caller ID laws, but Kramer was also slapped with 26 criminal charges. 13 of these were for impersonating a candidate, which, even when it is the president, is unbelievably only a misdemeanor. But he was also charged with 13 counts of voter suppression—a serious felony.[4]
6 3D-Printed Guns
When 25-year-old Blake Ellison-Crate masterminded a scheme to make guns using the relatively new technology of 3D printing, he probably did not suspect that a much older technology called the telephone would help bring him down. The aspiring arms dealer, who was already serving 12 years for firearms offenses, actually directed the Winnipeg-based operation from his cell using a smuggled cell phone.
Accomplices on the outside bought the 3D printers and stored them around the city to make it harder for the police to catch on. It actually might have worked if all of the parts could have been printed. But when Ellison-Crate’s associates approached metal fabricators about producing the parts that they could not print, several of the fabricators warned the police.
Four addresses were raided, and numerous weapons were seized, but oddly, only one had been 3D printed. Police suspect that around 30 to 40 were already on the streets. Ellison-Crate’s mistake was that he also used the prison phones to do business. The calls, which often lasted hours, were all recorded. He was handed an additional ten years.[5]
5 Chemical Weapon Drones
Another case that highlights the terrifying dangers of 3D printing is that of Mohamad Al-Bared. In 2023, he was found guilty of preparing for terrorism after British police officers raided the home in Coventry that he shared with his parents. Inside one of the bedrooms was a 3D printer and a highly sophisticated drone that Al-Bared—a mechanical engineering graduate who was studying for a PhD—had apparently built himself.
It is thought that some of the parts were printed. The drone even had landing gears and a camera, and it was said to be able to carry explosives or even chemicals. Al-Bared claimed that he had built the drone for his own research, but officers also found an application form for the Islamic State terror group as well as encrypted chats showing his support for them. He had also set up a fake company so that he could pose as a businessman and travel to Africa with his drone.[6]
4 Virtual Terrorism
While it could easily be shown that Mohamad Al-Bared was planning to do real harm, the same cannot be said of Nikita Uvarov, who was just 16 years old when he was found guilty of a similar charge in Russia. Uvarov was sentenced to five years in prison in 2022 on a charge of training for terrorist activities. The case was widely covered in the media because some of the alleged training involved the beloved video game Minecraft.
Uvarov and two friends had been planning to build and then blow up a virtual FSB building in the game. The FSB is Russia’s intelligence service, and it seems that they or other Russian authorities saw the mayhem the boys were planning on Minecraft as a genuine threat. They also claimed that the boys had been distributing flyers in support of a Russian anarchist and that they had been testing explosives in abandoned buildings. However, journalists noticed a pattern in the country around that time of young people being jailed on terrorism charges even though the case against them was weak.[7]
3 Building a Death Ray
It might sound like something out of science fiction, but one man actually has been found guilty of charges related to a death ray. The man in question is an American called Glendon Scott Crawford, a former General Electric mechanic and Ku Klux Klan member who describes himself as a cross between Darth Vader and Forrest Gump. He was convicted in 2015 of “attempting to produce or use a radiological dispersal device,” becoming the first person to be jailed under the law since it was enacted in 2004.
Crawford was believed to be planning to hide his device, which he described as “Hiroshima on a light switch,” in a truck outside targets such as mosques and even the White House. If set off remotely, it would have sent deadly radiation into the surrounding area. Fortunately, the co-conspirators to whom he thought he was safely spilling his plans turned out to be undercover agents. His plans only ever got as far as building the remote control. Crawford was sentenced to 30 years in prison, with the sentencing judge describing him as “bizarre” after he lectured the courtroom about physics and the collapse of the Soviet Union.[8]
2 $10 Million Streaming Scam
Turning back to the non-violent brand of tech-savvy criminals, one surprising area of technology that they have turned to is music streaming. One person who is alleged to have used this to make more than $10 million in royalty payments is a U.S. musician named Michael Smith. He is accused of using AI to create thousands of songs, which he then repeatedly streams on services such as Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, and YouTube Music using bots.
His scheme was so large that the bots would sometimes stream his songs more than 660,000 times per day. Smith has been charged with three counts related to wire fraud and money laundering, although his is the first case related to “artificially inflated” music streaming. However, similar tactics have reportedly been used by gangs in Sweden to launder money since at least 2019. Spotify—a Swedish company—has acknowledged the difficulty of policing fake streams but believes that it accounts for less than 1% of all streams.[9]
1 VR Murder
This last entry has not resulted in any broken laws just yet, but clearly, it is a crime waiting to happen. It concerns a virtual reality headset that belongs to Palmer Luckey, the founder of one of the most notable VR firms—Oculus. After leaving that firm in 2017, he went on to found a military contractor and reportedly ended up designing a device that married the two industries. It is a VR headset that contains explosive charges that kill the user if they die inside the simulated reality.
The device was inspired by a Japanese anime and novel series called Sword Art Online, which features a headset known as NerveGear with a similar function. As of 2022, Luckey said he had never used the device because it still needed a lot of work and could kill users at the wrong time. He said it exists only to make people think about “unexplored avenues in game design.” But with the technology already existing, just how long might they remain unexplored?[10]