The FBI has offered large rewards
for information that could help them catch a clutch of alleged cybercriminals,
including an El Salvadoran national accused of selling a Trojan designed to spy
on husbands or wives believed by their spouses to be cheating on them.
The details published on the FBI website
covers all types of cybercrime, including database theft and hacking, telecom
fraud, and malware scams. But it is the curious tale of
Carlos Enrique Perez-Melara that offers the most more unusual case.
The FBI has been after Perez-Melara since 2005 when a warrant was
issued for his arrest in connection with the "Lover Spy" spyware
program designed to "catch a cheating lover" that was distributed to
victims as an electronic greetings card.
It's not known whether the suspect
is still in the U.S., but the FBI accuses him of selling his program to 1000
customers who then used it to infect possibly several thousand others as part
of his San Diego-based business.
The two interesting elements of the
case are its age—the FBI has had no leads for eight years—and the fact it
relates to a malware offense from what might now be described as the early
years of complex spyware between 2003 and 2005 when awareness and detection of
custom-written spyware was low.
Other
bounties offered
With the U.S. overrun with
cybercriminals, the determination to pursue historic cases, even small ones, is
now seen by prosecutors as an important deterrent. Anyone with information on
Perez-Melara's whereabouts could result in a $50,000 reward.
Other cold cases include the $50,000
being offered for information on Andrey Nabilevich Taame, a Syrian national
accused of click fraud on a grand scale between 2007 and 2010; $50,000 each for
information on Noor Aziz Uddin and Farhan Ul Arshad, Pakistanis accused of involvement
in a huge international, organized fraud that defrauded victims of $50 million.
The largest reward of $100,000 is
reserved for Russian Aleksey Belan, accused of raiding customer databases
belonging to several large U.S. e-commerce firms as recently as April 2013.
"Throughout its history, the
FBI has depended on the public's help and support to bring criminals to
justice. That was true in the gangster era, and it's just as true in the cyber
era. We need the public's help to catch these individuals who have made it
their mission to spy on and steal from our nation and our citizens," said
the FBI's Richard McFeely.
"The cyber fugitives we seek
have caused significant losses to individuals and to our economy. And
cybercrime continues to pose a significant threat to our national
security." McFeely added.
