Cyber Crime world writhed in immense disbelief and pain yesterday as cyber squads consolidated their latest move. A well-planned move by governments of US and Egypt, the Operation Phish Fry targeted a large number of scamsters in connection with multinational bank phishig case.

Following confirmations from US Department of Justice, 54 suspects were indicted in US alone in Nevada, California, and North Carolina. The most significant arrest was that of the US ringleader Kenneth Joseph Lucas whose name figured in every one of the indictment’s fifty-one counts. Jonathan Preston Clark and Nichole Michelle Merzi were alleged as other key participants.

The phishing scheme unraveled involved a dispatching fraudulent emails to tempt victims to bogus bank sites where they were duped into revealing their personal information and banking data. This user information was then forwarded to accomplices in America who initiated fund transfer to other bank accounts. A portion of these funds was withdrawn and transferred to the Egyptian crooks.

According toThom Mrozek, a spokesman of the US Department of Justice, "At the end of the day, it's a very simple scheme ; "I think it is very well understood by the average citizen. Everyone out there with a computer has seen e-mails that say, "Hi, we're from your financial institution. Come to our web site and fill out this information." The money that was illegally stolen in last few days is pegged at $ 1.5 million and scamsters had targeted prestigious institutions like Bank of America and Wells Fargo. It is emerging that most of these email heists involved relatively smaller amounts of money in hundreds of American dollars. The reason may be either the belief that stealing small amounts would defy suspicion or simply limitation in victim’s existing account. The email scam is known to have been functional since 2007.

The director of the Internet Storm Center, Dr. Johannes Ullrich mentioned that usually Egypt is not associated with cyber crimes of this nature. Ullrich was right while remarking, “"One of the big problems with computer crime like phishing is that the main actors frequently are protected from law enforcement by residing in a foreign country. The FBI has proven in the past that they are able to reach out to these foreign countries, and this is more evidence of this." All said and done, this largest operation against email phishing scam has wizened the majority of trusting and naive web users globally to the dangers of falling into such cyber attacks.