Three men, Timothy Edward Livingston, 30, of Boca Raton, Florida; Tomasz Chmielarz, 32, of Rutherford, New Jersey; and Devin James McArthur, 27, of Ellicott City, Maryland, have been charged over a hacking scheme that allegedly collected tens of millions of personal records for use in spam campaigns.

The trios primary goal was to advertise insurance companies and other online sites that sold narcotics without prescription. Part of the scheme was to use the email systems of hacked companies in order to avoid antispam security filters.

U.S. prosecutors say the trio broke into the networks of three companies and improperly accessed the network of a fourth one where one of the men was employed. The indictment does not name the companies, but one is a major telecommunications company, and the second a technology consulting company, both based in New York. Third company was a credit monitoring company and the fourth another telecommunications company in Pennsylvania.

The spamming activities generated up to $2 million.

Source: PCWorld