Japanese poker Poker Internet Scams

Friday July 26,2013 : POKER ACE THE SUBJECT OF MALWARE CHARGES
 
Masaaki Kagawa cited as defendant in contact-stealing malware case
 
Japanese poker ace and well-known live tournament player Masaaki Kagawa (50) is reportedly facing charges of running an illegal operation that combined spam, Android malware, and a fake dating website to scam victims out of $3.9 million, according to the publication Ars Technica, quoting a Symantec report.
 
The Web security company collaborated with investigators from the Chiba Prefectural Police in Japan, who earlier this week arrested nine individuals for distributing spam that included e-mails with links to download Android.Enesoluty – a malware used to collect contact details stored on owners' devicea, according to the Symantec blog.
 
Android.Enesoluty is a Trojan distributed as an Android application file. It steals information and sends it to computers run by hackers.
 
Tokyo-based Kagawa is president of an IT firm titled Koei Planning, and was cited as the principle defendant in the case.
 
The Symantec blog notes:
 
"From our observations, the operation began around September 2012 and ended in April 2013 when authorities raided the company office.
 
"We confirmed around 150 domains were registered to host the malicious apps during this time span. According to media reports, the group was able to collect approximately 37 million e-mail addresses from around 810,000 Android devices.
 
"The company earned over 390 million yen (approximately 3.9 million US dollars) by running a fake online dating service called Sakura in the last five months of the spam operation. Spam used to lure victims to the dating site was sent to the addresses collected by the malware."