Russian MP furious following son's 27 year imprisonment

A member of Russian Parliament is outraged after his son was handed down a sentence of 27 years in prison for computer hacking crimes in the United States.

Roman Valeryevich Seleznev, 32, was convicted in August for stealing credit card data from US restaurants, causing nearly $170m in damages.

Russian MP Valery Seleznev said the sentence was "passed by man-eaters" and that his son was "abducted".

Seleznev has made millions by selling the data on the dark web, US officials say.

"It's a sentence passed by man-eaters...My son was abducted," Mr Seleznev told RIA Novosti news agency.

"My son was tortured because being in jail in a foreign country after abduction is torture in itself. He is innocent," he continued.

Mr Seleznev, who is a member of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR), added that he viewed the sentence as a life sentence because his son would never survive 27 years in prison.

Seleznev hacked into retail point-of-sale systems and installed malicious software that enabled him to steal millions of credit card numbers from more than 500 American businesses and 3,700 financial institutions, according to the justice department, as reported between 2009 and 2013.

The data was then sent to servers which he controlled in Russia, the Ukraine and McLean, Virginia, and sold the information on criminal "carding" websites, where users bought them for fraudulent purchases, officials said.

In July 2014, Seleznev was taken into custody in the Maldives and his laptop at the time contained more than 1.7m stolen credit card numbers.

Evidence has showed that he earned tens of millions of dollars from the scheme.

Most of the businesses which he targeted were mainly small businesses, which include Broadway Grill in Seattle, this company was forced into bankruptcy following the cyber attack.

"Today is a bad day for hackers around the world," said US Attorney Annette L Hayes. "The notion that the internet is a Wild West where anything goes is a thing of the past.

"Whether the victims are multi-national banks or small pizza joints, we are all victims when our day-to-day transactions result in millions of dollars ending up in the wrong hands."