A 19-year-old from Pennsylvania has been charged with criminal and civil fraud, after his October 9 arrest for allegedly hijacking an investor's brokerage account and making unauthorized stock trades in July, federal officials announced.
Van Dinh of Phoenixville is believe to have pulled it off after giving the unsuspecting investor what the government called a purported stock charting tool which included a Trojan horse program that let Dinh take control of the investor's computer, according to Agence France Presse.
If he's convicted, Dinh could be looking at up to 20 years behind bars on the fraud charges and 10 years for the computer crime charges, not to mention up to one million dollars in fines, AFP said. Investigators tracked him down despite his use of online aliases
"This case should be a reminder to Internet users," said Boston-based U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan to AFP, "that every time they open an e-mail from an unknown sender it is as if they are opening the front door of their house to a stranger."
The Securities and Exchange Commission said they had never before seen this kind of case, which involved what court documents called Dinh sending an e-mail in July inviting users of an Internet stock discussion forum to test a charting tool – which they didn't know was really a keystroke logger called "The Beast," and which let Dinh monitor users who downloaded the "tool" remotely. He got the login and password for his victim's TD Waterhouse online brokerage account and went from there, according to the documents.
Dinh himself owned "a large number of options" to buy Cisco Systems shares at "far above the current price, making them worthless," the SEC told reporters, and keeping them worthless if the stock stayed above $15. He allegedly hacked into the trading account to put in a buy order for the options so he could pocket the money and put worthless options into the trader's pocket.
