A federal jury has sentenced two Romanian alleged cybercriminals for 21 counts for spreading malware in 4,00,000 individual computers, in order to steal credit card details and illicitly mine cryptocurrency, as per the report shared by US Department of Justice on April 11. 

The malware forcefully spread by the suspects was being used for cryptojacking and to steal credit card and other data which suspects may have sold on darknet and to participate in Online auction fraud. 

As per the reports, the two individuals, Bogdan Nicolescu, 36, and Radu Miclaus, 37, have been sentenced after a 12-day trial. Both have been charged for wire fraud, conspiracy to traffic in counterfeit service marks, aggravated identity theft, conspiracy to commit money laundering and 12 counts each of wire fraud. Both of them will be sentenced on August 14, 2019.

Both the individuals have been running their operations from Bucharest, Romania. They started developing malware way back in 2007 and spread it via emails posing as legitimate communications from firms such as Western Union, Norton Antivirus, and the IRS. 

As soon as the recipients click on the attached file in an email, malware gets installed on the devices. The malware can collect an email address from the contact list of victims. The infected computers further registered over 10,000 AOL email accounts which were later used to spread malware in millions of emails sent to the stolen address. 

Also, as soon as Victims visited websites such as Facebook and PayPal, the cybercriminals redirected them to similar websites which would steal their data once entered. Financial data of users will be used to steal funds and other data will be sold on the Dark Web. 

The Romanian duo used the funds to pay for Virtual Private Network (VPNs) by which they will remain anonyms. The operator then observed fraudulent post listings on websites such as eBay, to force users to click on file affected with malware.

Lastly, it was noted that the cased was solved jointly by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Romanian National Police.