Brian Levine

Danette, consistent with the plea agreement, was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

McClouse was sentenced to 18 years.

And Nicolescu, who was master fraud, was sentenced to 20 years.

Wow, 20 years.

That sounds like a lot.

These are tremendous sentences for a cybercrime case.

What you gotta remember is the judges who sentence, and it's the judge who sentences, not the jury, they sentence for all kinds of cases.

They see terrorism, they see murder, they see all these crazy cases.

So at the end of the day, a lot of judges are like, well,

You know, this guy hacked, you know, we're talking $4 million or $40 million or whatever the case may be.

It's not a billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.

It's not nobody died, so I'm going to give him a couple years.

We see that all the time.

And so it was only because, I think, we had so much great evidence.

We had so many victims testify about how it impacted them, the money mules.

and the scope of the crime and we were also able to show that these guys weren't just doing their criminal job they were really sadistic they really wanted to hurt the victims for example um they developed one phishing email that was supposedly your hiv test results and when you clicked on the link you were positive it's like why would you do that

You know, I mean, like you're freaking people out way more than even the value of the money.

And so I think the judge realized this was a serious group.

It was a serious threat.

If they get back out there, they may just start up again.