Glaswegian

A 23-year-old Romanian man has become the first foreigner to be convicted by a US court for phishing.

Ovidiu-Ionut Nicola-Roman, of Craiova, Romania, was sentenced to four years and two months in prison Monday for his role in an international phishing operation. Prosecutors had charged him with setting up fake banking sites and then sending out tens of thousands of fraudulent spam messages in hopes of tricking victims into giving up their account information.

The sentence was handed down by Judge Janet Hall of the United States District Court in Connecticut.

Nicola-Roman was arrested in Bulgaria and extradited to the US in November 2007. He pleaded guilty last July to a fraud charge and had been facing a possible five years in prison. Additional charges that he faced in California were dropped because they were not listed in his extradition request.

He was charged as part of a larger phishing bust that also named six other Romanians, none of whom have been arrested.

Security experts say countries such as Russia, Romania and the Ukraine have become hotbeds of cybercrime, in part because local governments are slow to prosecute fraudsters who take money from victims in other countries such as the US.

The FBI said Monday that Internet fraud complaints had spiked 33 percent year-over-year in 2008.


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