Two men were arrested on suspicion of using a computer virus to steal personal information and leak it onto the Internet and then defrauding people of money by offering to resecure the data.
This is the first arrest in the nation in a case of fraud using a computer virus, and it is only the second incident in which computer virus creators have been arrested. The first such arrest occurred in January 2008, when the Kyoto prefectural police arrested the creator of the so-called Harada virus on suspicion of violating the Copyright Law.
According to Metropolitan Police Department sources, Kenzo Oka, 27, a company employee of Kita Ward, Tokyo, and another man, 20, were arrested Tuesday and May 10, respectively. The name of the younger man, who is a member of an Internet advertising company in Saitama Prefecture, is being withheld because he was 19 years old at the time of the incident.
Read more in the Daily Yomiuri Online.