Two men pleaded guilty to a scam that lowered the bills of 5,790 Comcast customers in Pennsylvania by a total of $2.4 million. They now face prison time and will have to pay their ill-gotten wealth back to Comcast.

30-year-old Richard Justin Spraggins of Philadelphia pleaded guilty in February and was "ordered to make $66,825 in restitution and serve an 11- to 23-month sentence," the Times-Herald of Norristown wrote at the time.

Scaggins was described as the second-in-command of the operation. The accused ringleader, 30-year-old Alston Buchanan, pleaded guilty last week. "Buchanan faces up to 57½ to 115 years in prison, although Buchanan will likely serve a lesser sentence than the maximum," the newspaper wrote.

There is no agreed-upon sentence—the judge will decide how long Buchanan will spend in prison and how much he'll have to pay back. “Comcast lost $2.4 million and it will be up to the judge to see how much the defendant will be required to pay back," prosecutor Jeremy Lupo said.

Comcast customers saved an average of $414 in exchange for paying the defendants $75 to $150. "According to the affidavit of probable cause, Buchanan bought the login identification from a Comcast employee and was able to login to the system remotely and change the accounts to lower monthly bills," the Times-Herald wrote. According to another Times-Herald article, Buchanan "worked as a dispatcher for Comcast in from May 2007 to March 2008 and was familiar with the company’s billing system."

Tipped off by a suspicious customer, Comcast reported the scam to police in April 2012 after it had been going on for a year. "Investigators were able to make contact with someone known as 'Nick' who told them to deposit money into a bank account. The bank account was Buchanan’s," the newspaper wrote. Police searched Buchanan's apartment and found ledgers filled with customer information, along with $100,000 in cash.

UPDATE: In response to questions from Ars, Comcast said that it has "enhanced our audit/review process to help identify and prevent this type of activity in the future."

Customers were not charged retroactively for the discounted amounts, but their bills were "corrected on a moving-forward basis."

Lupo said in a court hearing last year that "all customers ended up having to pay more money to make up for the loss."