Yahoo Japan phisher rearrested
February 07, 2006
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police allege that Sunao Koizumi, 25, using stolen user IDs and passwords of about 500 Yahoo auction users, won about 300 bids for a total of about 5.5 million yen ($47,000) worth of book vouchers and travel coupons on Internet auctions and resold the products.
Police said Sunao Koizumi from Inage Warda, Chiba, Japan, has admitted to the allegations. He was quoted of telling police investigators, "I came up with this method myself. I resold the defrauded vouchers to pay my living expenses."
According to the MPD's Computer Crimes Control Center, Sunao Koizumi operated a phishing site almost identical to that of Yahoo! Auction for 10 months until January. A 28-year-old woman from Yokohama was misled into logging onto the site, and Koizumi was able to acquire her ID and password.
On Jan. 13, Koizumi accessed Yahoo! Auction using the illegally obtained ID at a Net cafe in Toshima Ward, Tokyo. He was the winning bidder for two travel tickets for 20,700 yen ($174) and a battery pack that a 42-year-old male company employee from Misato, Saitama Prefecture, put up for auction.
Koizumi was arrested Jan. 17 for trespassing when he showed up at an apartment building in Saitama Prefecture where he asked for the merchandise to be delivered.
The MPD said the arrest was the first in the nation on the charge of phishing-fraud, though a person was previously arrested for opening and running a phishing site.
Last June, Kazuma Yabuno, 42, a former computer system engineer, was arrested for stealing personal information through phishing and was sentenced to 22 months in prison, suspended for four years, but the allegation of fraud was not established in that case.
Yabuno created and ran a Web site that looked like Yahoo Japan's Web site, and obtained account numbers and passwords of Yahoo members who accessed the fake site.
The defendant "bears a grave responsibility because he infringed on the privacy (of Yahoo Japan members) by abusing his abundant knowledge of computers," Judge Mitsuaki Takayama said in the ruling. "However, he did not use the stolen information to commit other crimes."
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