Romanian National, First Foreigner To Be Convicted For Phishing In The USA

Ovidiu-Ionut Nicola-Roman, originally from the Romanian city of Craiova, has been sentenced to four years and two months in prison. Prosecutors charged him with creating phony banking sites and sending out tens of thousands of spam messages in the hope of fooling victims to provide their account information.

He was arrested in Bulgaria and extradited to the United States in November 2007. In July last year, he pleaded guilty to the charge of fraud. He was convicted following an operation against phishing fraud, which involved another six Romanian citizens, who have not been arrested.

In the case of Nicola-Roman, prosecutors found 2,600 credit and debit card numbers in his e-mail accounts. According to evidence submitted to the court, he created phony websites in October 2005 to trick the clients of the People's Bank, but also owned software used to scam customers of Wells Fargo, Suntrust, Amazon.com, PayPal and eBay. He did not write the software himself, but had many online defrauding instruments, including a program called Web Data Extractor, which he used to obtain e-mail addresses.

According to the defense attorney, Nicola-Roman, who used to be a clothes salesman, committed the frauds in order to pay for the treatment of his ill mother.

If you liked this story, please follow MEDIAFAX.RO on FACEBOOK »

The content of mediafax.ro is for your information only. Republishing or using this content is forbidden without express consent of MEDIAFAX. For this consent, please ask for it by mail at vanzari@mediafax.ro.