FBI adds bounties to five alleged crackers, fraudsters and phreaks

The FBI has placed bounties on the heads of five of the most notorious alleged botnet masters, telco fraudsters and hackers.

Farhan Arshad, Noor Aziz Uddin, Carlos Perez-Melara, Andrey Nabilevich Taame and Alexsey Belan have bounties ranging from US$50,000 (A$52,675) to US$100,000 (A$105,351) on their heads under the agency's Cyber’s Most Wanted list.

“The FBI will not stand by and watch our cyber adversaries attack our networks; we will track down and arrest individuals who have made it their mission to spy on and steal from our nation and citizens,” cyber crime branch assistant director Richard McFeely said in a statement.

The FBI said it would "ferret out" the targets using its international network of allied law enforcement agencies.

Taame is alleged to be one of seven operators of the notorious Ghost Click bot that infected four million victims across 100 countries between 2007 and 2011.

The malware altered the target's Domain Name System settings to redirect traffic to selected websites in order to run up large online advertising revenue.

Arshad and Uddin are alleged to have run an international telecommunications fraud scheme between 2008 and last year that defrauded telcos, individuals and governments of some $US50 million, according to the FBI.

The men are accused of racking up expensive phone calls against victims in dozens of countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Switzerland.

Perez-Melara is alleged to have tapped private conversations of hundreds of victims a decade ago by sending spyware to targets disguised as a greeting card. He then received intercepted email communications from the targets.

Meanwhile, the FBI sought Belan for his alleged involvement in a trio of data breaches from 2012 to 2013 in which he is accused of stealing staff credentials to exfiltrate corporate data for financial gain.

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