Malware Charges Raised Against Poker Ace

According to recent reports, Japanese poker ace and well-known live tournament player Masaaki Kagawa (50) has been charged with running an illegal operation that combines spam, Android malware, and a fake dating website, and scamming victims out of $3.9 million. Earlier this week, investigators from the Chiba Prefectural Police in Japan arrested nine persons for distributing spam such as e-mails with links to download Android.Enesoluty - a malware used to collect contact details stored on owners' devices and distributed as an Android application file. The main defendant in the case is Tokyo-based Kagawa, who is president of an IT firm Koei Planning. According to the Symantec blog which reported on these events, "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."