"A 21 count indictment was unsealed today charging three Romanian nationals for operating a cyber fraud conspiracy in which they infected between 60,000 and 160,000 computers, sent out 11 million malicious emails and stole at least $4 million," the release said on Friday. "Bogdan Nicolescu, 34, Tiberiu Danet, 31, and Radu Miclaus, 34, were extradited to the United States this week after being taken into custody in their native Romania earlier this year."
Each person was charged with 12 counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to traffic in counterfeit service marks, among other offenses, the release noted.
According to the indictment, Nicolescu, Danet and Miclaus together operated a criminal conspiracy from Bucharest, Romania, which began at least as early 2007, allegedly using the computers to get credit card information, user names and passwords, the release explained.
Additionally, they three activated files that forced infected computers to register more than 100,000 email accounts, and sent a total of more than 11 million emails that contained the malware, the release added.
The defendants then used stolen credit card information to fund their criminal infrastructure while hiding their identities, according to the release.
