A man living in Miami, Florida, was convicted yesterday of stealing over 10 million minutes of VoIP calls and reselling them for $0.004 per minute.
The indictment from U.S. prosecutors stated that Edwin Pena paid a hacker named Robert Moore approximately $20,000 to help him illegally route Internet phone calls through the networks of 15 different VoIP service providers.
Pena impersonated a legitimate telecommunications service provider while employing hacking techniques to attack VoIP network systems, stealing service usage time worth a total of $300,000.
The U.S. prosecutors charged Pena with unauthorized access to network systems.
Starting in November 2004, the 23-year-old man sold Internet telecommunication services at very low prices through his two companies, Fortes Telecom Inc. and Miami Tech & Consulting Inc.
Pena and Moore were accused of building a web server to conceal their activities and launching denial-of-service attacks on the networks of VoIP providers to acquire codes for legal VoIP calls. Once they cracked this security code, the criminals would redirect their calls through the legitimate VoIP network systems.
This operation allowed the duo to generate over $1 billion in revenue.
Hoang Dung
