Three men were arrested on Monday for engaging in a wide-ranging hacking and spamming scheme that targeted personal information of 60 million people including Comcast customers, U.S. prosecutors announced Tuesday.
Timothy Livingston, 30, Tomasz Chmielarz, 32, and Devin McArthur, 27, were named in an indictment filed in federal court in Newark, New Jersey that charged them with conspiracy to commit fraud and related activity among other offenses.
Prosecutors said Livingston, a Boca Raton, Florida, resident, was the leader of a series of computer hacking and illegal spamming schemes that targeted multiple companies and generated illegal profits exceeding $2 million.
Prosecutors said Livingston, who owned a spam company called “A Whole Lot of Nothing LLC,” hired Chmielarz of Rutherford, New Jersey to author hacking tools and other programs that facilitated the hacking and spamming schemes.
Among the companies they targeted was a Pennsylvania-based telecommunications company that employed McArthur, a resident of Ellicott City, Maryland, who installed hacking tools in company networks to gain access to records for 50 million people, prosecutors said.
The company was not identified by name in court papers. But McArthur’s LinkedIn page says he worked at Comcast Corp during the period in question. A Comcast spokeswoman had no immediate comment.
Other companies targeted in the schemes included a New York-based technology and consulting company whose website was compromised and a Texas-based credit monitoring firm that was hacked, the indictment said.
When law enforcement seized Livingston’s computer in July, they discovered a database with 7 million of that company’s records, the indictment said.
