THE CRIMINAL Assets Bureau (Cab) has seized almost $700,000 (about €522,000) from an international crime gang which took small amounts of money from more than 60,000 credit cards, the details of which had been illegally obtained on the black market.
The gang, which includes brothers from the former Yugoslavia, set up an account in the Republic with a subsidiary of Bank of Ireland.
Harry, Daniel and Kristian Zeman, are from the former Yugoslavia but have lived in Sweden, were trading as Routeback Media AB.
They are known to the police in Sweden and have been investigated there at different times over the past decade.
In the High Court yesterday, Mr Justice Kevin Feeney ruled the money – $697,000 in total – was generated by way of a fraud and should be confiscated by the Criminal Assets Bureau.
The brothers said they were selling e-mail services for $9.95 from a website they had established.
They claimed they would use a spam e-mail marketing drive to generate interest in the “e-mail for life” service they were selling.
When customers paid for the service with their credit cards, $9.95 taken from the cards as payment would be deposited in the account in Ireland.
The Zeman brothers informed the Bank of Ireland company, Euroconex, that they expected to sell about 1,000 e-mail services in their first year of trading, meaning just under $10,000 would flow into the facility that Euroconex was providing for them.
However, when Euroconex opened the facility in October 2002, some 110,000 transactions, all at $9.95 each, were recorded in the first four days, the majority of which were successful.
It is believed the credit card details obtained by the brothers belonged to US citizens who had gambled on offshore websites, because online gambling is illegal in the US.
The credit card details of those gambling online were gathered by criminal elements that had access to the gambling sites and were sold on to other criminals for the purpose of money being stolen from the cards.
Many of the card-holders would have known their card details were stolen when they used the illegal gambling sites.
Having broken the law, they would most likely have felt unable to report the theft on their cards and effectively accepted the theft of $9.95.
The gang targeted by the Criminal Assets Bureau in Ireland used a computer programme to run the details of the 110,000 cards through the Euroconex account in just four days.
A number of the transactions were rejected by Euroconex while others that initially went through were challenged by card-holders or their US banks and their money was refunded.
However, some 64,000 of the transactions were successfully concluded and that money was never reclaimed by either the card-holders or their banks.
This generated almost $700,000 into the Zeman gang’s Euroconex account in just four days.
Euroconex made a “suspicious transaction report” to the Garda.
When Euroconex refused to release the money to the Zeman brothers, they tried unsuccessfully to sue Euroconex to have the funds released.
A forensic trawl of the internet found no evidence of any of the e-mail services they claimed to have sold, nor was there any evidence of the spam e-mail campaign they said they ran that had proved so successful it led to more than 110,000 orders for their service in their first four days of operation.
The Criminal Assets Bureau estimated that for every million spams sent, there is a transaction in between one and four cases.
These averages meant the brothers would have needed to send 90 billion spam e-mails to generate the level of sales they claimed they made.
This figure would have been equal to 8 per cent of all of the e-mails sent by people in the US in 2002.