Man gets jail for hacking woman’s bank account

By Lethbridge Herald on June 15, 2023.

Delon Shurtz
Lethbridge Herald

A 36-year-old man who was able to hack into a woman’s bank account using her stolen cellphone, will spend several months behind bars.

Benson Robert Nitsiza pleaded guilty Wednesday in Lethbridge court of justice to one count of fraud over $5,000 and was sentenced to three months in jail.

Court was told that on April 3 of last year, a short time after the phone had been stolen, the owner of the phone was checking her bank account and realized $10,000 was missing. 

Police discovered $8,000 of the missing money had been transferred to Nitsiza’s bank account, and the remaining $2,000 ended up in the bank account of a well-known drug dealer.

“As I understand it, he actually had to get somebody else to unlock the phone; he didn’t really have the wherewithal to do that,” Crown Prosecutor Clayton Giles said. “But what is frightening is how exposed a modern person is when a telephone leaves their hands.”

Giles noted that while there is no evidence to show that Nitsiza stole the phone, he was in possession of it.

Nitsiza also pleaded guilty to one count of shopbreaking and was sentenced to another two months in jail.

Nitsiza had cut a hole in a chain link fence belonging to a business next to the homeless shelter on the northside. Unknown to Nitsiza, the owner of the business was watching the crime unfold on her video monitoring system, and she contacted the police. When police arrived Nitsiza was still standing by the hole.

Although sentenced to a total of five months in jail, Nitsiza was given credit for the equivalent of 98 days he spent in remand custody since his arrest in April, leaving 52 days to serve. Follow @DShurtzHerald on Twitter