GEORGIA – The federal government unsealed an indictment on Thursday against two Vietnamese citizens who live in the Netherlands, for their roles in hacking email service providers in U.S., officials said.
One of the defendants has plead guilty.
Also a federal grand jury returned an indictment this week against a Canadian citizen for conspiring to launder the proceeds obtained as a result of the massive data breach.
“This case reflects the cutting-edge problems posed by today’s cybercrime cases, where the hackers didn’t target just a single company; they infiltrated most of the country’s email distribution firms,” said Acting U.S. Attorney John A. Horn.
Adding, “And the scope of the intrusion is unnerving, in that the hackers didn’t stop after stealing the companies’ proprietary data—they then hijacked the companies’ own distribution platforms to send out bulk emails and reaped the profits from email traffic directed to specific websites.”
According to allegations in the indictments, these are the facts and circumstances surrounding this case:
- Between February 2009 and June 2012, Viet Quoc Nguyen, 28, a citizen of Vietnam, allegedly hacked into at least eight email service providers throughout the United States.
- He stole confidential information, including proprietary marketing data containing over one billion email addresses.
- Nguyen, along with Giang Hoang Vu, 25, also a citizen of Vietnam, then allegedly used the data to send “spam” to tens of millions of email recipients.
- The data breach was the largest in U.S. history and was the subject of a Congressional inquiry in June 2011.
- David-Manuel Santos Da Silva, 33, of Montreal, Canada, was also indicted by a federal grand jury this week, for conspiracy to commit money laundering for helping Nguyen and Vu to generate revenue from the “spam” and launder the proceeds.
- According to allegations in the indictments, Da Silva, the co-owner, president and a director of 21 Celsius Inc., a Canadian corporation that ran Marketbay.com, entered into an affiliate marketing arrangement with Nguyen that allowed the defendants to generate revenue from the computer intrusions and data thefts.
- As an affiliate marketer, Nguyen allegedly received a commission on sales generated from Internet traffic that he directed to websites promoting specific products.
- Nguyen allegedly used the information stolen from the email service providers to send “spam” emails to tens of millions of customers and provided hyperlinks to allow the purchase of the products.
- These products were marketed by Da Silva’s Marketbay.com.
- Between May 2009 and October 2011, Nguyen and Da Silva received approximately $2 million for the sale of products derived from Nguyen’s affiliate marketing activities.
- Vu was arrested by Dutch law enforcement in Deventer, Netherlands, in 2012 and extradited to the United States in March 2014.
- On Feb. 5, 2015, Vu pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit computer fraud.
He is scheduled to be sentenced on April 21 before U.S. District Judge Timothy C. Batten Sr. of the Northern District of Georgia. Nguyen is a fugitive.
Da Silva was arrested based upon charges set forth in a criminal complaint at Ft. Lauderdale International Airport on last month and is scheduled to be arraigned today in Atlanta before Magistrate Judge E. Clayton Scofield III.