Sentence denies hacker who stole Lava Jato messages

The conviction of Walter Delgatti, the hacker who helped destroy Lava Jato and who is now trying to incriminate former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL), demonstrates that he acted for money and that he had a history of bank fraud. The details of his sentence, handed down the week after his testimony at the CPMI on January 8, belie some of the answers he gave to government parliamentarians, mainly the narrative that he wanted to do justice.

In Congress, Delgatti said that, initially, he only wanted to invade the account of a prosecutor from Araraquara who was supposedly pursuing him. According to his account, this prosecutor, who was also his law professor at college, arranged for him to be arrested for drug trafficking based on a police report that found prescription drugs in his house, but for which he had a prescription. doctor. Having spent six months in jail, Delgatti said that, at a hearing, he saw the prosecutor messing with his cell phone and noticed that he was using Telegram.

This would have occurred in 2017. Delgatti said he spent more than two years trying to hack into the prosecutor’s cell phone. When he succeeded, he had access to his contact book in the messaging application, through which he reached the cell phones of Lava Jato prosecutors.

“As soon as I got it, I found compromising messages from the prosecutor, and also got his diary. And in that, I continued accessing Telegram until I reached Lava Jato, and when I saw the Lava Jato conversations, I saw that there was a persecution with President Lula and I thought: the same thing that happens to me here happens to him, and, in a free, spontaneous way, I publicized the conversations at the time, which was the ‘jet leak’”, he said.

The same story was told in the process in which Delgatti was sentenced to 20 years in prison. The judge in the case, however, demonstrated, based on the evidence, that the first invasions served to steal personal data and access the victims’ bank accounts or extort them.

In the case of the prosecutor, the invasion would have occurred after the one that was made against Lava Jato prosecutors, according to investigations by the Federal Police. “The invasion of Prosecutor Marcel Zanin Bombardi’s telephone is true, but its initial motivation would have been public agents who put up with the Lava Jato operation, since the police authority’s report (pages 175) indicates that this attack was after the invasions by members of the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office, which reinforces his desire to seek financially for the disclosure of these conversations,” wrote Judge Ricardo Leite, of the 10th Federal Court in Brasília, in the sentence.

In an award-winning statement, Luiz Molição, a member of Delgatti’s group, said that he wanted to find a journalist to sell the material for BRL 200,000, which, according to Leite, “destroys Walter’s allegation that he acted altruistically and seeking repair an injustice”.

“This statement by Walter is so true, as numerous authorities were hacked and not just public agents of Lava Jato. If the intention really was only to repair injustices, it would not have hacked the Minister of State for the Economy Paulo Guedes and CNMP Counselors. The range of victims is immense and could lead to numerous occasions of extortion”, says the judge.

criminal tactics

In total, the PF managed to identify 126 victims of Delgatti’s clandestine interceptions. From January to July 2019, before he was discovered, his bank transactions totaled BRL 107,700. In the previous five months, from August to December 2018, the amount of BRL 893 thousand passed through its accounts.

In the complaint against him and his group, the Public Ministry narrated that Walter Delgatti used digital platforms to obtain bank details of the victims. He still participated, according to the investigations, in specialized chats for the commercialization of information.

“Their criminal tactics included attacks known as
phishingfraud technique online used by criminals to steal bank passwords and other information from victims; prints of messages that interlocutors pass on information about credit card numbers, bank accounts and other personal data of potential victims; in addition to personal conversation with possible victims, in order to install malicious programs that would enable data collection”, describes the sentence.

The same device used to hack Telegram accounts also served him to make calls as if the number were from a bank. The technique was to use Internet telephony services that enabled the caller to use an existing telephone or cell phone number belonging to another person or company.

“There was a recording of a dialogue in which Walter presented himself as responsible for the technical security area of ​​a financial institution and instructed a customer of a banking entity to update his computer in order to install a malicious program”, reports the sentence, with an example of how it worked.

The complaint against Delgatti also narrates how he made contact with ex-deputy Manuela, from the PCdoB, to reach journalist Glenn Greenwald, who used the messages to demoralize the anti-corruption operation in a series of reports on the website The Intercept Brasil and in other vehicles that were also interested in exploring the content of conversations.

When describing the conduct of a partner of Delgatti, Gustavo Santos, also convicted, Judge Ricardo Leite says that he had a reasonable command of information technology and was an active member of virtual groups aimed at bank fraud.

The criminal organization he set up with Delgatti, says the judge, “was aimed at committing any offense in the cybernetic world, provided that, with this tool, financial resources were raised by the accused”. In the investigation, the PF captured screen prints of a Delgatti computer with images of Telegram accounts of several artists.

The PF also found that, in the case of 43 victims, mainly authorities, Delgatti was able to monitor conversations in real time. “The ultimate goal of these cyberattacks was profit.”

Hacker tries to link Bolsonaro to alleged wiretap against Moraes; ex-president’s defense

From 2019, the year of his arrest, until now, Delgatti has been banned from using the internet and, as a result, has been unable to “work”. Last year, while responding to the process in freedom, he said that he approached deputy Carla Zambelli (PL-SP) to get a job. It was she who took the hacker to meet Bolsonaro.

The former president said that his objective, in the conversation, was to find out if the electronic voting machines were fraudulent. Delgatti went further and claimed that Bolsonaro would have asked him to simulate a fake attack to generate distrust in the system. He also said that Bolsonaro would have illegally tapped Minister Alexandre de Moraes, of the Federal Supreme Court.

The day after his testimony to the CPMI, Delgatti was called to the PF to provide clarification on contradictions in relation to what the corporation had already investigated in the case of the meeting.

Lawyer Fabio Wajngarten, who defends the former president, published a series of messages on social media denying Delgatti’s claims. Wajngarten stated that “at no time did they even consider the entry of computer technicians, much less technological climbers in the campaign” of Bolsonaro, and that he does not know “anyone who has had an individual meeting with Bolsonaro whose duration has been 1 hour and a half”. “There has never, ever been a wiretap, or any illegal or non-republican activity, against any political entity in Brazil by the President’s primary circle. Mind and mind and mind,” he said.

Lawyer Daniel Bialski, who defends Carla Zambelli, said that the deputy “refutes and rejects any accusation of illicit or immoral conduct”, denying what he calls the “allegions and teratologies” mentioned by Delgatti. He also said that the hacker is a person without credibility who changes versions and that his word is “without suitability”.