Arrests in Florida, Israel Potentially Linked to JPMorgan Chase Hack
WASHINGTON, July 22 (UPI) — Federal authorities Tuesday arrested four men in Florida and Israel over fraudulent investment charges involving the 2014 hack of JPMorgan Chase.
JPMorgan Chase was hacked in July 2014, when the contact information of 83 million customers was compromised. At the time, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) determined that the hack was not particularly sophisticated and that it succeeded because of the bank’s failure to update one of its remote servers.
Two men, Anthony Murgio and Yuri Lebedev, were arrested in Florida on charges of running an illegal money-transfer operation involving Bitcoins. The arrests of Gery Shalon, Ziv Orenstein were made in Israel in connection to a “pump-and-dump” stock scheme dating back to 2011.
The U.S. government says it will look to extradite the men.
Federal prosecutors revealed court filings from Manhattan that shone a light on the stock scheme. They point to a multi-year campaign that was used to raise the price of worthless penny stocks by spamming millions of investors that would not have known better. An anonymous official who was briefed on the situation believed that the email addresses taken from JPMorgan Chase were also going to be spammed.
It remains unclear whether the email addresses were used or not.
Another initiative organized by the men involved Bitcoins. Criminals who had been paid in Bitcoins by computer users looking to remove malicious software from their computers cashed in their Bitcoins for actual money. The orchestrators of this scheme hid themselves behind a small New Jersey credit union.
JPMorgan declined to speak on the subject of the arrests as of Tuesday.
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