Late last week, the Justice Department announced charges against two Vietnamese citizens living in the Netherlands and a Canadian for their roles in the hacking of at least eight email service providers throughout the United States between 2009 and 2012.  The accused hacker Viet Quoc Nguyen stole information including proprietary marketing data containing more than a billion email addresses, which Nguyen then exploited along with Gian Hoang Vu, another defendant by sending spam to millions of the email addresses. Nguyen and Vu received approximately two million dollars in commissions on sales generated by the spam that directed the recipients to the websites for numerous products.  The third defendant, David-Manuel Santos Da Silva was indicated on money laundering and other related charges.

TIPS

Gian Hoang Vu was arrested by Dutch law enforcement officers in the Netherlands in 2012 and was extradited to the United States in March of 2014.  Last month he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit computer fraud and will be sentenced in April.  David-Manuel Santos Da Silva was arrested in Florida in February and was arraigned last week.  Nguyen is still presently on the loose.

The investigations into this matter and the arrests of two of the three people accused is a good example of increase cooperation between not only American law enforcement agencies, but also those of foreign countries and is the type of concerted effort and cooperation it will take to effectively battle against international white collar computer crime.