FBI Teams With China to Nab Alleged Hackers
The U.S. last week brought charges against two Arkansas men for operating an e-mail hacking website, needapassword.com, which offered to obtain passwords to any e-mail account for a fee. The scheme, operated by Mark Anthony Townsend of Cedarville, Ark., and Joshua Alan Tabor of Prairie Grove, affected some 6,000 accounts, according to a Jan. 24 press release from the Federal Bureau of Investigations. Cedarville and Prairie Grove have a combined population of less than 6,000 people. Yet the investigation into the website stretched around the globe.
Three customers, scattered across California, Michigan, and the Bronx, have been charged with hiring the hackers. One of them, John Ross Jesensky of Northridge, Calif., allegedly paid $21,675 to a Chinese website to get e-mail account passwords, according to the release. The FBI coordinated its investigation with law enforcement agencies in Romania, India, and China, resulting in arrests in all three countries. China’s Ministry of Public Security arrested Ying Liu, also known as Brent Liu, for operating the website hacktohire.net—an arrest noted in the FBI press release and also in a separate announcement on the ministry’s website, dated Jan. 27.
