Trial
He was arrested in 1985 for hacking into a British Telecom computer and accessing the Telecom Gold emails of Prince Philip. As there was no specific law against hacking at this time, in June 1985 he became (together with a codefendant) the first person to be charged under section 1 of the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981 with forgery which deceived a non-human target. When the case came to trial in April 1986, Schifreen was said to have used an unprotected top level account identified as "2222222222" with a password of "1234"; Schifreen was said to have admitted obtaining user passwords but denied doing so for personal gain and said that his activities prompted Prestel to increase security. On 24 April 1986 Schifreen was convicted on six counts of forgery and fined £750.
Read more about this topic: Robert Schifreen
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