Three former Purdue University students have been accused of hacking into professors' accounts to change their grades, allegedly running a complicated scheme that lasted years, the Lafayette Journal & Courier reports.
They face a total of 58 charges, some felonies and some misdemeanors. All three are now 24 years old, and recently unsealed court documents allege the scheme lasted from 2008 until about 2012.
Roy Chaoran Sun (currently a grad student at Boston University) was an electrical engineering major who earned his bachelor's degree in 2010, Mitsutoshi Shirasaki was an aeronautics and astronautics major, and Sujay Sharma was a nuclear engineering major.
Sun is suspected of changing nine F's and one incomplete, the Lafayette Journal & Courier reports. Shirasaki has been accused of changing 24 grades in two years. Some of those grades went from F's to A's and B's.
Shirasaki and Sharma aren't enrolled in the school anymore, and Sun has already graduated. Sun's degree is now being reviewed, and there will be a hearing to give him a chance to respond to the allegations, a Purdue spokesperson told the Lafayette Journal & Courier.
The alleged scheme was found out when a professor noticed that his password had been changed multiple times by an unknown party.
To orchestrate the scheme, the suspects allegedly broke into professors' offices to switch their computer keyboards with identical ones. The suspects then allegedly installed key logging devices onto the professors' original keyboards, broke into the offices again, and put the original keyboards back. Once the key logging devices were in place, the students could figure out the passwords for the professors' computers, prosecutors claim.
Join the conversation about this story »
     |