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Japan – from www.mdn.mainichi.jp – Some 1.1 million computers have been infected with a virus that displays obscene images that can’t be erased without sending money to its suspected creators, Kyoto Prefectural Police announced.
Company executive Shinya Horimoto, 33, and five other men have been arrested on suspicion of distributing the virus, which according to police prompted about 10,000 victims to pay a total of around 600 million yen in the year ending last January to get rid of the pornographic images.
With the scale of damage, police view the incident as one of the largest so-called “one-click fraud” schemes ever, and are now building a case against the six men on suspicion of fraud.
According to police, Horimoto and the five other accused assembled the technical team for the fraud scheme through job ads, and then opened bank accounts to accept the transferred funds under 21 corporate names.
To distribute the virus, the team created 20 new pornographic and celebrity gossip Internet sites which then led users to another adult site. The virus was downloaded to a user’s computer if they played a video on this second site.
The suspects are believed to have started the bank transfer fraud scheme a number of years ago, but apparently added the pornographic imagery to the virus when the transfers started to dry up.