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Saturday 15 January, 2005

Tsunami scam arrest in Pennsylvania

In the first arrest in a nationwide crackdown on tsunami relief scams, the FBI took a Carrick man into custody yesterday morning on charges of flooding the Internet with spam solicitations for a bogus relief fund so he could pay to fix his car.

Matthew Z. Schmieder, 24, who lives in a rented brick duplex on Crailo Street, admitted to the FBI that he sent out 800,000 e-mails purporting to be from the Mercy Corps, an international group of humanitarian agencies, according to an affidavit.

Schmieder confessed to lifting images from the Mercy Corps Web site to use in spam messages and trying to fool donors into sending him money through a PayPal account he established, the FBI said.

Read more here
2 Comments Post a Comment
Blogger Nickfox said :

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

Sat Jan 15, 01:34:00 pm IST  
Anonymous Anonymous said :

How can a person do that? This Tsunami is the biggest disaster I have seen in my life (besides 9/11) but I have never seen more people die from something like this. Someone is punishing the world for people exactly like that. People who have no heart.

Sun Jan 16, 10:05:00 am IST