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Internet crime crackdown nabs 125
Death threat spammer among them

By Reuters

Published: Friday 21 November 2003

Attorney General John Ashcroft said Thursday that 125 suspects have been arrested in a crackdown on internet crimes ranging from hacking to fraud to selling stolen goods.

The seven-week sweep involved police from Ghana to Southern California and uncovered 125,000 victims who had lost more than $100m, he told a news conference.

"The information superhighway should be a conduit for communication, information and commerce, not an expressway for crime," Ashcroft said.

Those arrested stand charged with a variety of crimes that highlight the innumerable scams and criminal acts that now take place online.

Many are accused of selling stolen or nonexistent goods online, a leading cybercrime category. Suspects fenced stolen goods through online auction sites like eBay, set up phony escrow services to handle payments and touted fraudulent investment clubs through slick websites, according to a summary of cases the Department of Justice provided.

Some suspects allegedly stole classified files from government computers, hacked into business computers to steal customers' credit card numbers, disabled computers running child abuse hotlines and sold counterfeit software or computer memory chips, the Justice Department said.

It said one California man continued to send online death threats to a Canadian who he thought was sending him spam e-mail, even after authorities asked him to stop.

US Secret Service agents worked with foreign law enforcers to track down suspects who operated across international borders, leading to the arrest of a Romanian man who they said bilked some $500,000 from online auction participants.

Authorities in Ghana and Nigeria also helped track down suspects and recover millions of dollars in allegedly ill-gotten gains.

Chief Postal Inspector Lee Heath said many suspects were simply transferring time-honoured scams to the Internet.

"We'd like to say it's just old wine in a new bottle," he said.

Federal agents said they had not yet found the perpetrators of the Blaster worm and SoBig email virus that disabled millions of computers this summer, but had gained some valuable leads, thanks to a reward program set up by Microsoft.

A similar cybercrime sweep in the first half of the year led to 135 arrests.