A young man succeeds in staying in luxury hotels for a dime

Spanish police announced on Wednesday that they had arrested a 20-year-old man on suspicion of hacking into a website through which he booked luxury hotel rooms for just one cent, in the first cybercrime of this kind.

It is believed that the suspect tampered with the website’s electronic payment system, making changes to the payment validation mechanism, so that reservations appeared to be fully paid.

But all he was actually paying was a very small amount of one cent for rooms costing about a thousand euros per night.

The Spanish police explained, “This electronic attack was specifically aimed at modifying the payment verification system, and this is the first time we have discovered a crime using this method.”

She added that the young man was also consuming other content during his stay, and sometimes left unpaid bills.

At the time of his arrest, he was staying at a luxury hotel in Madrid, under a reservation for four nights with a total value of 4,000 euros.