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Technology

Hackers from India indicted

By: Karthik :+: Under: Technology
On: ⋅ March 13, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment
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Jaisankar Marimuthu, Chockalingam Ramanathan of Chennai and Thirumugnanam Ramanathan an Indian native, now a resident of Malaysia have been indicted in a high-tech international fraud scheme.

From initial reports published less than a half hour ago, it looks like they accessed dozens of brokerage accounts to jack up stock prices and in the process made atleast $120,000, costing one of the brokerage firms losses in the region of $2 million.

The alleged “hack, pump and dump” scheme cost one brokerage firm at least $2 million in losses, the Justice Department announced Monday. An estimated 60 customers and nine U.S. brokerage firms, including Ameritrade Holding Corp., E-Trade Financial Corp. and OptionsXpress (nasdaq: OXPS - news - people ), were duped in the case during a four-month period last year.

The scheme sounds pretty simple. Buy stocks at cheap prices, gain unauthorized access into others accounts and buy shares to inflate prices and dump their personal stocks to make a profit.

Some of the victims were hard hit, like this particular example

One victim had $180,000 cash and equity in his account, and five days later returned from a trip to find a negative $200,000 balance, according to the SEC.

This also happens to be a landmark case as this is the first time people from another country have been arrested for defrauding a US based online brokerage firm.

You can read the entire report on the case over at Forbes.com and as usual, we will keep our readers posted of any new updates.

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