Alleged MySpace hackers arrested
The operators of a site that allowed MySpace.com users to track their visitors have been charged with trying to extort $150,000 from the service.
Though the two site owners/operators were arrested, they claim they were trying to "land a job with Myspace.com", and that Myspace.com "improperly lured" the two men with the prospect of a consulting contract.
The News Side
Shaun Harrison, 18, and Saverio Mondelli, 19, were arrested last Friday after travelling to Los Angeles to meet with undercover agents posing as MySpace employees, the LA District Attorney's office said in a statement, released Wednesday.
The meeting was part of a shakedown attempt, the DA said, and the two have now been charged with illegal computer access and extortion. If convicted, they could face more than four years in prison. MySpace had blocked Harrison and Mondelli's software earlier this year. After it did that, the defendants allegedly threatened to release new "unbreakable" code unless MySpace paid $150,000, the DA said.
Harrison and Mondelli operated the MySpaceplus.com site, which offered users a way to get information on visitors to their MySpace pages. This information included visitor's email addresses, the number of visits they had paid to the MySpace page, and the address of the page they had last viewed.
MySpaceplus had claimed to be "the largest MySpace spy community anywhere," with more than 55,000 users, according to a description on the AdBrite advertising marketplace.
Harrison and Mondelli are being held on $35,000 bail each. A preliminary hearing in Los Angeles Superior Court is set for June 5.
MySpacePlus.com's Side
Lawyer: Pair sought jobsBY JOSEPH MALLIA
Newsday Staff WriterMay 27, 2006
Two teenage Long Island computer programmers were trying to land a job with MySpace.com, not trying to extort the Web site, one of their attorneys said Friday.
The popular social networking site improperly lured Saverio Mondelli, 19, and Shaun Harrison, 18, to Los Angeles with the prospect of a consulting contract, said Mondelli's lawyer, Michael Dowd of Manhattan.
And when they arrived in California last week and sat down for a business meeting with what they thought was a contingent of MySpace employees - who were actually Secret Service agents and local detectives - they were arrested without warning, Dowd said.
"The proposition to hire them as consultants was made by MySpace," Dowd said. "This was a naked attempt to lure them into the lion's den and to somehow make an allegation of impropriety against them."
MySpace became aware of the teens when they caught them hacking into their site late last year, authorities said. MySpace spokesman Jeff Berman denied its employees acted improperly.
"That's absurd," Berman said of Dowd's allegations. "MySpace is a responsible company. We've cooperated fully with law enforcement, and our employees abide by the highest ethical standards."
Berman said he could not comment further on the specifics of the case because the matter is under investigation.
Harrison and Mondelli are partners in a Web site development company, Enxeo LLC, on Route 112 in Medford. A man who answered Enxeo's telephone Friday, who declined to give his name, said of the two teens, "They're young businessmen, good people."
From the teenagers' perspective, they hoped to profit from their invention of a useful computer program that allowed people to see the online identities of anyone browsing the MySpace site, Dowd said.
But the Los Angeles district attorney says that the two demanded $150,000 after hacking into MySpace, then threatened to release a computer code that would undermine the site's privacy guarantees.
Harrison, of Ronkonkoma, and Mondelli, a New York Institute of Technology student from Oakdale, pleaded not guilty and each face a court date next month on two felony counts of illegal computer access and one count of attempted extortion, authorities said. They were released on $35,000 bail Thursday after spending six days in jail and are now "holed up in a hotel" in Los Angeles, Dowd said.
Months ago, the pair, 2005 graduates of Connetquot High School, retained a lawyer in New York to negotiate a consulting contract "concerning their technical expertise and their Web site," MySpacePlus.com, Dowd said. But, he said, the company then used the ruse of a consulting contract to set them up for a fall.
"Mammoth Internet companies like MySpace.com don't like competition, and they deal with the competition by squelching and stomping them," he said.
Prosecutor Jeffrey McGrath could not be reached for comment Friday. Harrison's Los Angeles public defender also could not be reached.
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