Intellexa founder, three others sentenced to 8 years in prison over Greek spyware scandal

A Greek court on Thursday sentenced the founder of the Intellexa Consortium and three associates to prison for their role in a sprawling spyware scandal that has dominated Greek headlines since it came to light in 2022.

The Misdemeanour Court in Athens sentenced the defendants to more than 126 years in prison, but under Greek law they will only serve eight years, according to local news reports.

The sentences will be appealed and the defendants will remain free until the appeal process concludes.

The defendants are Intellexa founder Tal Dilian; Sara Hamou, a corporate off-shoring specialist who provided managerial services to the consortium; Felix Bitzios, a former deputy administrator of Intellexa; and Yiannis Lavranos. 

Lavranos’s company, Krikel — a surveillance tools supplier — allegedly purchased Predator, the spyware made by Intellexa that was used to snoop on more than 90 Greeks from 2020-2021, local news reports said. Victims include a prominent financial journalist, opposition politicians, government ministers, intelligence service operatives and prosecutors.The defendants reportedly denied wrongdoing but the Greek court found them guilty of several counts of unlawful access to private communication systems and violations of privacy and data laws. 

The convictions are a significant turn of events for the spyware maker, which has been accused of facilitating spying on dozens of members of civil society worldwide along with the president of the European Parliament, the president of Taiwan and U.S. senators.

The convictions could have a devastating effect on Intellexa, experts said, even if the defendants flee to a jurisdiction that does not extradite to Greece.

“When you're found guilty of a crime in a European court and there's a prison sentence attached, you are potentially expeditable in a lot of countries around the world that have treaties with Greece,” said John Scott-Railton, a digital forensic researcher at the Citizen Lab who helped document the Predator targeting in Greece. “Nobody's going to want to bank you if you're sentenced in absentia.”

Scott-Railton noted that the judge said the conduct and testimony revealed at trial warrants a referral for potential future prosecution on additional charges.

“This is going to be a huge ball and chain that Intellexa’s executives are going to be dragging around,” he said, adding that the verdict proves the importance of investigating spyware abuses.

One of the victims of the spying, financial journalist Thanasis Koukakis, said he is relieved by the verdict, but believes the process is just beginning. He noted that the court ruled that prosecutors must open an inquiry to probe whether more serious espionage charges are also warranted.

“We’re still in the beginning,” he told Recorded Future News. 

Still, he described the day as an important win, saying that the ruling demonstrated that Greek citizens will not be “defenseless in the face of arbitrary actions by those who possess the technical expertise and the means to monitor them, without any real justification.” 

The Citizen Lab found that Koukakis’s device was infected with Predator at least between July and September 2021.

On February 18, Amnesty International revealed that Predator was used to infect the phone of a prominent press freedom advocate in Angola in 2024. In December, Amnesty researchers found a Pakistani human rights lawyer had also been targeted with Predator during the summer of 2025.

Intellexa executives and consultants, including Dilian and Hamou, were sanctioned by the Biden administration in 2024. In December, the Trump administration reversed the sanctions against Hamou and two other Intellexa executives, though Dilian remains on the list.

Despite the sanctions, Intellexa has proven resilient and its spyware infrastructure continues to be detected worldwide.