14 DAY TRIAL // The man that illicitly used the LimeWire P2P client to hack into personal computers and steal financial or personal information was convicted to three years behind bars in the state of Washington, USA. Frederick Eugene Wood, a Seattle native, used his Limewire client to acquire enough data so he could impersonate up to 120 people in various financial operations.
After being arrested for a puny crime, police officers found incriminating evidence on his personal computer to charge him with various identity and computer identity theft charges. Mr. Wood was initially arrested after scamming and selling a box, which was supposed to contain a laptop to another man.
His conviction comes after the investigation proved that he used the LimeWire P2P client to search other people’s computers for tax documents, financial statements, bank account information and college applications. From those documents, he extracted all the necessary information to be able to forge checks and acquire various products for his benefit using other people’s bank accounts.
Police found that he had personal data for about 120 persons, and was in possession of multiple fake driver licenses. He also admitted to have shown and taught the same tricks to Gregory Kopiloff, another identity thief arrested and convicted in 2008 for 51 months.
During July 2007 and March 2008, Woods used LimeWire's flawed settings that automatically shared the entire hard-drive if no manual sharing instructions were setup and acquired possession of the above mentioned documents.
After this scandal, and the release of sensitive White House information through the LimeWire client, Mark Gorton, LimeWire chairman and founder, was called by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform for a hearing on this topic. The testimony delivered by Mr. Gorton revealed that “There are hundreds of P2P applications in the world that are based on the same protocol as LimeWire, that allow user access to this same network, and consequently, that contribute to the issue of inadvertent file-sharing. […] As far as I am concerned, the days of self-regulation should be over for the file-sharing industry.”
To prevent similar problems, LimeWire 5, the future release will not share by default all the users documents, and when manually configured by the user, it will display three warning messages regarding the actions they will take.