Man Sentenced for Extorting Internet Betting Sites

An evil man, who forcibly extracted money via exploiting Internet gambling sites as the South Africa scheduled Football World Cup for 2010 geared up, has been charged in a Düsseldorf court in Germany, so published NakedSecurity in news on June 16, 2011.

Moreover, it has been learnt that the unidentified man from Frankfurt managed to threaten 3 betting websites as well as tried to get 3 others to generate money for him or else face DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) assaults due to which the sites could have crashed down.

The man reportedly blackmailed 6 bookmaker websites with the assaults for which he used a rented Russian botnet at a daily rate of USD65, while demanding a large sum of 2,500 Euros if the website wished averting the assaults. As a result, while 3 websites from the total 6 agreed to pay 5,000 Euros, the remaining 3 resisted any payment despite the sum being lessened to 1,000 Euros.

Thus owing to his offence, the defendant got a 34-month sentence of imprisonment along with an order to compensate the companies of their losses by paying a maximum of 350,000 Euros ($504,000).

Notably, Distributed Denial-of-Service assaults have become prominent during the last few months ever-since they've been utilized to serve different political objectives, especially when the Anonymous gang executed most of the assaults. Lately, the European Commission suggested rules which would raise punishments in case anyone employed botnets or committed other online offence.

However, the use of DDoS assaults for blackmailing betting sites just before an important sporting event isn't unprecedented. For, during 2006, one gangster group from Russia reportedly made British bookmakers pay $4m under duress following which a sentence to prison was declared for the group.

IT lawyer Dominik Boecker in Cologne, who wrote an electronic mail to Deutsche Welle, said that he trusted the decision taken was right. Attacking a company with a DDoS assault was simply stupid. Unfortunately, in such a criminal norm, a query sent to the remote computer server was identical to what happened whilst the website was used ordinarily, he explained. DW-WORLD.DE published this in news on June 15, 2011.

Related article: Man Sues and Wins against ISP for Spamming Mail

» SPAMfighter News - 6/27/2011