For years, cybercrime has been moving to Eastern Europe and Asia. Now U.S. law enforcement is following it.
Glancing at his file, there's little in the case of 23-year-old Ovidiu-Ionut Nicola-Roman to distinguish him from the average cybercriminal. Beginning in 2005, he was a member of a massive "phishing" scheme that harvested millions of e-mail addresses from the Web and used a program called "E-mail Sender Express" to barrage those addresses with spam messages at a rate of around 30,000 an hour.
Those e-mails lured users to Web sites that impersonated banking pages requiring account information, realistically spoofing businesses like Wells Fargo ( WFC - news - people ), Regions Bank, Charter One and PayPal. The scheme brought in thousands of credit card numbers and PINs, each of which was used to siphon off cash from ATMs at a rate of as much as $1,000 per card.
All of those tactics follow the typical playbook of modern malicious hackers. But Nicola-Roman holds a distinction nonetheless: In March, he became the first foreigner to be extradited to the U.S. and convicted of phishing.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/01/cyberbusts-security-internet-technology-security-cyberbusts.html
