14 DAY TRIAL // On Friday, we reported that India’s Central Bureau of Investigation arrested an individual from Pune as part of an international law enforcement operation against cybercriminals. More details have been provided by the FBI.
The operation targeted the operators and the customers of websites that had offered email hacking services.
Law enforcement agencies from Romania, China, India and the US have been involved in this operation. In the US, five people have been charged with hacking email accounts. They’re expected to plead guilty.
Two of the US-based suspects are Mark Anthony Townsend, 45, and Joshua Alan Tabor, 29, both of Arkansas. They’re said to have been running an email hacking service called needpassword.com.
The FBI says the two have hacked into a total of around 6,000 email accounts. Their customers simply provided the email address to which they wanted access to. Payments were made via PayPal. Each of the suspects faces a five-year prison sentence.
The other three people charged in the US are customers of such services. One of them, a 30-year-old California man named John Ross Jesensky, has paid a Chinese website $21,675 (€15,847) for email account passwords.
In Romania, the Directorate for Combating Organized Crime (DCCO), under the authority of the Directorate for Investigating Infractions of Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT), searched the residences of individuals believed to be operating various hacking websites such as e-mail-hackers.com, spyhackgroup.com, rajahackers.com, clickhack.com and zhackgroup.com.
Four people have been charged. They’re said to be responsible for hacking 1,600 email accounts between February 2011 and October 2012.
In India, the Pune-based individual that has been arrested is Amit Tiwari, the man behind hirehacker.net and anonymiti.com. Tiwari and his accomplices are accused of hacking into close to 1,000 email accounts, 171 of which belong to people in India.