A man was convicted of illegally obtaining private information and sentenced to six years in prison on Thursday at the Luozhuang District People's Court in Linyi in East China's Shandong province.

The court ruled that Du Tianyu planted Trojan horse malicious program in April 2016 into a computer network operated by Shandong exam authorities and obtained more than 640,000 pieces of personal data of students who were to sit the National College Exams later that year.

Du allegedly sold over 100,000 of such information to Chen Wenhui and was paid 14,100 yuan ($2,116) by Chen, who was earlier sentenced to life.

Chen, the ringleader of a telecom fraud gang blamed in the death of a promising young student in East China, and six other people of the gang, were sentenced in July at the Linyi Intermediate People's Court. The others received prison terms of three to 15 years.

The gang cheated many victims out of a total of more than 560,000 yuan from November 2015 to August 2016, according to the court. More than 23,000 calls were made in which scammers posed as educational, financial or real estate officials.

The case took on national significance in August when one victim, Xu Yuyu, an 18-year-old university candidate from Linyi, died of cardiac arrest after being conned out of 9,900 yuan she had saved for her college tuition.

zhaolei@chinadaily.com.cn