US deports notorious hacker David Crees after cybercrime trial
An active and boastful hacker since his teenage years, David Crees crippled Australian universities and government services before falling prey to an FBI sting.
An Australian hacker has been deported as a part of US President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown after he was caught by the FBI.
David Kee Crees has a coterie of online monikers but is best known by the handles DR32 and Abdilo. After pleading guilty to serial fraud before a US Federal Court in Colorado, he was released from prison in May, only to be swiftly arrested and deported by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Crees, 26, has been an active and boastful hacker since his teenage years, crippling Australian universities and government services before shifting his attention overseas and falling prey to an FBI sting.
Early on Thursday last week, ICE announced Crees would be deported to Australia. “ICE Denver agents arrested Australian alien David Kee Crees because he has multiple computer fraud convictions,” a memo by the agency reads.
“He also faces charges for money laundering and ID fraud.”
US authorities had been on the tail of Crees for more than five years, having laid 22 charges against him for cyber fraud and alleged money-laundering and identity theft from June 2020 to July 2021. The US Attorney for the District of Colorado sought his extradition from Adelaide in 2022, which was granted in August of that year.
Crees spent the next 2½ years incarcerated, first in an Adelaide prison awaiting extradition, then in an American federal prison before his trial. He pleaded guilty to 14 counts of fraud in January, was sentenced to time served in May and walked free facing only minor penalties.
Approached for further information by The Australian, including whether the deportation had been co-ordinated with Australian diplomats, ICE said it “will not be able to release any more information on Mr Crees”. The US embassy also declined to comment.
Crees was approached for comment.
“The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade provided consular assistance to an Australian who was detained in the US,” a DFAT spokesperson said. “Owing to privacy obligations we are unable to provide further comment.”
Crees looks to have reset his personal social media upon securing his freedom, as family and wellwishers welcomed him back to Australia.
His Instagram page carries the brief account bio: “free”.
Specialist cybercrime publication DataBreaches.Net has charted Crees’s exploits over more than a decade and reported he had used Australian registered businesses in his hacking conquests.
An ABN in Adelaide registered to his name was cancelled from April 14, after two companies linked to it – ROOTKIT and SQLI – were deregistered.
Both companies are named after common hacking tools. A rootkit is an assortment of malware tools used to access and puppet systems from their highest level of access, while SQLI is named for a Structure Query Language Injection – a command that forces a block of code into a program, website or application to hack it.
Growing up across Adelaide and Alice Springs, Crees worked under the Abdilo handle in his teenage years, gaining notoriety for the mass theft of consumer information from insurer Aussie Travel Cover customers in 2015, s the largest Australian data breach at the time.
Other targets included the University of Sydney, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation and local government websites.
Around the same time, he began livestreaming his efforts, leaning on SQL injections to seize the private data of American universities and educators. He was raided by the Australian Federal Police in April 2015 and had his passwords seized.
He reportedly worked with a US hacking collective around this time known as the Lizard Squad, digital vandals who used distributed denial-of-service attacks to shut down online gaming services and hold them to ransom.
Resurfacing years later, this time as DR32, Crees caught the attention of US authorities when he made a grift out of selling illegally acquired user information and backdoors into breached systems.
DataBreaches.Net reported Crees was caught by two undercover FBI agents in a US Department of Homeland Security investigation, where he bragged about his exploits and broke his own anonymity.
His criminal trial centred on attacks against seven commercial victims and a ransomware group he had targeted.
As a part of the sting, one agent reportedly negotiated with Crees as a prospective customer, while another handled the transfer of cryptocurrency payments through which he was tracked.
SQLI and ROOTKIT were part of this transaction process.
Targets reportedly included Californian software, cybersecurity, hardware and social media companies, and a Massachusetts university.
In ‘rootkitting’ the ransomware group, Crees claimed to the undercover agent that he had access to 500,000 credit cards logged with a women’s clothing retailer. He also sold his pursuers access to a submarine communication cable system for US$200,000, according to court documents inspected by DataBreaches.Net.
The cable provided backbone internet access across a swath of European, middle eastern and North African nations, which gave the hacker “a parital [sic] God’s Eye view of the internet which would deanonymise anyone and everyone” in Crees’ own words.
“(It is) enough to begin an operation that will wiretap 11 countries,” he told the agent. “Welcome to the private NSA.”
Following his conviction and release, Crees was ordered to pay a US$1400 special assessment fee — a standard penalty for any federal felon — and surrender the $245,000 paid to him during the sting.
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