Sometimes the good guys win!

Sometimes the good guys do win as a 23 year old foreigner is convicted in the US for phishing. An article in PC World gave some interesting details about the conviction and the tactics he used to commit online fraud – and this is just the tip of the iceberg of what is really going on out there. Here are some interesting points from the article:

• He was part of a larger phishing ring with six other Romanians, none of whom have been arrested
• They found 2,600 credit and debit card numbers linked to him, and that he had probably harvested more
• He was likely to have phished customers of People’s Bank, Wells Fargo, Suntrust, Amazon.com, PayPal and eBay, according to court documents
• He doesn’t appear to have written software himself, but assembled a large collection of online fraud tools, including a program called Web Data Extractor, which harvested e-mail addresses [common business logic abuse]
• He sent spam to victims using a program called Email Sender Express, which could send 30,000 spam messages per hour.
• He was able to take an average of US$960 per card number collected, prosecutors said

Its a mixed blessing that the US convicts this 23 year old with much fanfare, but its also frustrating that its 2009 and its the first foreigner who’s been convicted. As Laura Mather pointed out in her recent post, its very difficult to get a conviction, making it that much more compelling for overseas fraudsters to do this. We need to continue to pursue and prosecute, but in the meantime, we need every available solution to fight against online fraud.