14 DAY TRIAL // A 35-years-old Texas man appeared before a Minneapolis court earlier this week after being charged with hacking into a payment system used by Digital River and stealing around $270,000.
According to an indictment filed on October 13, 2010, and unsealed on Tuesday, Jeremey Parker, 35, of Houston, Texas, stole funds that were meant for independent software developers who sell their programs through SWREG, a payment solutions vendor owned by Digital River since 2005.
SWREG operates an online system where software publishers can log in to see how many royalties they accumulated and withdraw them.
FBI investigators determined that between December 23, 2008, and October 15, 2009, Parker hacked into this system and wired $270,000 to his own bank account.
The alleged hacker is charged with one count of wire fraud which carries a maximum sentence of twenty years in prison, and one count of computer hacking, punishable by an additional ten.
According to the FBI, its Internet Crimes Complaint Center (IC3) received 22.3% more complaints in 2009 than in 2008 and the total losses amounted to almost $560 million.
Digital River is a large provider of e-commerce solutions, whose clients include big names like Microsoft, EA Games, Logitech, Autodesk, THQ, CAPCOM, NETGEAR and even antivirus vendors like Kaspersky Lab and Trend Micro.
Back in June, the company had to deal with a different security breach after personal data belonging to 200,000 of its customers was stolen by hackers and was put up for sale.
The number of incidents where hackers compromised payment systems and hijacked money intended for others has increased at an alarming rate in the past couple of years.
In April 2009 we reported that a man was charged with computer fraud after he compromised the online system of a New York-based currency-exchange service and sent himself $110,000.