Cyber Hacker Lewys Martin Wanted £1m in Bitcoin for 28,000 Halifax Customers' Bank Details

Cyber hacker Lewys Martin is facing a prison sentence after trying to blackmail Halifax bank by threatening to sell the stolen details of 28,000 account holders to the Sun newspaper.

Martin, 22, demanded one Bitcoin for every 10 sets of details he was holding on a memory card, or 2,800 Bitcoin - equivalent to £1,050,000 by today's exchange rate.

He used phishing programmes - appearing as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication - to steal data directly from the bank's customers.

Police eventually traced Martin despite his best efforts to conceal his identity using special software to shield his IP address.

The crimes were reported to police by Lloyd's Banking Group and The Sun, concerning attempts to blackmail the bank over stolen account details of 28,000 of its customers.

Martin had previously received a two year jail sentence in May 2013, for using his IT expertise to launch cyber attacks on the websites of Oxford and Cambridge universities.

He inundated the websites with requests for so much information their servers went down.

Appearing at Southwark Crown Court in September, Martin confessed to blackmail and two counts of possession of articles for use in fraud.

He also pleaded guilty to possessing an indecent photograph of a child at level five on the Copine scale, which depict deliberately posed erotic scenes.

Lewis entered a further guilty plea to possessing a further eight photographs of children at level four, which show poses suggesting sexual interest.

He will be sentenced at the same court today.