FBI Charges Dozens in Global Computer Virus Scam

By Jeremy A. Kaplan
Published September 30, 2010
FoxNews.com

Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, at a press conference announcing charges against 60 members of an international cybercrime ring.

A massive international cybercrime scheme that relied on Internet viruses to loot millions of dollars from U.S. and foreign bank accounts has been broken, federal law enforcement officials said.

Federal authorities announced charges Thursday afternoon against 60 people worldwide in connection with the scheme, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said, an expansion on the Tuesday arrest of 19 people in London accused of stealing nearly $10 million from U.K. banks. Federal prosecutors accused the defendants of using "a potent strain" of the Zeus Trojan and other Internet viruses to siphon the money from bank accounts in the U.S. and abroad.

Thirty-seven U.S. citizens were charged with snatching at least $3 million from American bank accounts at the news conference in New York City, where nine of the accused were arrested. There are still 17 accused who remain at large, the FBI said, and they are actively seeking their arrest.

"From thousands of miles away, they got their cyber hands on OPM: other people's money," said Janice K. Fedarcyk, assistant director-in-charge of the New York Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The scheme involved the use of "money mules" to transfer the finds between bank accounts and ultimately to sources in Europe and Russia, the FBI said. The U.S. suspects appear to be primarily henchmen, while the suspects arrested earlier in the week in London were ringleaders, Richard Wang, manager of security firm SophosLabs, told FoxNews.com.

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