More phishers and spammers face prison time

US, Dutch and Japanese police crack down on online bad guys.

Of a series of arrests and convictions this week, the most spectacular headlines centre on the potential 101-year sentence faced by a Californian credit-card phisher, convicted of breaching the US CAN-SPAM act. 45-year-old Jeffrey Goodin's campaign of emails targeted AOL users, claiming to come from the online giant's billing service and demanding updated payment details.

Information gleaned from the campaign allowed the man to go on a $1 million shopping spree with other people's credit, but his use of faked header data contravened the 2003 US anti-spam laws, which allow mass emails as long as they contain legitimate information and functioning unsubscribe options. He was also convicted of several other fraud and deception offences. The 101-year sentence is the maximum he could face for all charges, a lower figure is expected at his sentencing in June. More information is available from Bloomberg.

Meanwhile in the Netherlands, two men are being held on suspicion of creating and using worms and trojans to form a 1.5 million strong botnet of infected computers, raking in profits from adware installations and stolen bank details. They made an estimated 600,000 Euros, and face two or three years in jail, according to vnunet.

Finally, the Japanese Mainichi Daily News reports that the 47-year-old president of a Tokyo-based dating site has been arrested, along with three others, on suspicion of being behind a campaign which sent out 5.4 billion emails in two months. The gang set up 128 computers in China, and used a bought-in list of email addresses to bombard with spam to build their dating business. Once again, using false sender data was their downfall, and the four are said to have confessed to their crimes. More details are here.

17 January 2007

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