iTunes and Amazon Music Scammers Busted

The UK Metro Police's Central e-crime Unit (PCeU) and the FBI have collaborated to bust a gang of fraudsters, which scammed Apple and Amazon out of over $300,000 in paid royalty fees. The cybercrooks uploaded self-made songs to the iTunes Store and Amazon MP3 and then bought them back using stolen credit cards.

Last Wednesday, police officers raided several locations in London, Kent, Wolverhampton and Birmingham and arrested ten individuals, seven men and three women, suspected to be part of the fraud ring. They have been charged with conspiracy to commit fraud and money laundering.

"This has been a complex investigation to establish what we believe to be an international conspiracy to defraud Apple and Amazon," Detective Chief Inspector Terry Wilson, from the PCeU, commented for the BBC.

The gang is said to have contracted with an US company for prompting their music, knowing that the company's services involved making their tracks available for sale on iTunes and Amazon. As soon as that happened, they proceeded to buying their own music from the two online stores using around 1,500 stolen UK and US credit cards.

The cybercrooks allegedly made transactions of over $1.2 million, which in return won them around $300,000 in royalties paid by Apple and Amazon. Authorities started investigating the complex scheme back in February. "We are now making it more risky for criminals who seek to exploit the Internet and commit e-crime across national borders," Detective Wilson also noted.

The Police Central e-crime Unit (PCeU) of the Metropolitan Police was created in April 2008 in order to fill the void left after the 2006 disbandment of the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit. Seriously underfunded, the unit officially started its operations this spring and has already scored some noteworthy hits.

Back in April, a PCeU investigation led to the arrest of a London-based gang of Eastern Europeans who were installing Trojans on computers belonging to various financial institutions and stealing money from compromised accounts.