Nine men were arrested in Japan for distributing spam which included emails that contained links to download Android.Enesoluty - which is a Trojan horse for Android devices that steals information and sends it to a remote location.



According to a blog post from Symantec, the arrested men include Masaaki Kagawa, the 50-year-old president of the Koei Planning, an IT firm located in Shibuya, Tokyo. He is also apparently known as an avid poker player who participates in poker tournaments worldwide and has earned over a million US dollars in these competitions. He appears to be the main player running the operation. His passion for taking chances and risks has paid off in the game of Poker, but it’s not looking good for his gambling with Android malware. Kagawa and his associates now await a likely prosecution.

According to Symantec; the operation began around September, 2012 and ended in April, 2013 when authorities raided the company office.

Symantec 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 email 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 site 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.