A US man has been sentenced to seven years in a federal prison for his part in an elaborate phishing scam that targeted users of AOL.
Michael Dolan, 24, from Connecticut pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and aggravated identity theft last year.
He has received the maximum sentence possible for the crime and will also serve three years' probation after his release.
Reports say that Dolan was one of a gang of men that ran the phishing scam between 2002 and 2006.
The gang harvested AOL screen-names and e-mail addresses from chat rooms and then used spam e-mail to infect users' PCs with trojans. In some cases victims would receive a fake e-card or bogus messages claiming to be from AOL's billing department.
The malware would prevent AOL users from logging onto the site without entering their credit card numbers, bank account details and other personal data.
This data was then used by Dolan and others to pay for products online online and to produce counterfeit debit cards.
In other phishing news, hundreds of users of Apple's .Mac and MobileMe online services have been conned into handing over credit card details and other personal information, according to security out fit CardCops.
Dan Clements, president of CardCops, told ComputerWorld that phishers scammed between 100 and 200 people with mac.com addresses in just one day.
AOL phisher gets seven year sentence - New York Times
Phishing scam dupes hundreds of MobileMe users - ComputerWorld