Famous Japanese poker player arrested for android malware distribution

Nine individuals were arrested by the Chiba Prefectural Police in Japan earlier this week. One of them is the poker champion “Masaaki Kagawa,” who won more than a million dollars on global competitions and also a president of an IT firm,.

Those individuals are reported to be behind the distribution of spam that included emails with links to download Android.Enesoluty. An android malware used to collect contact details stored on the owner’s device.

Confirmed, around 150 domains were registered by the scammers to host the malicious apps. And according to other reports, the group was able to collect approximately 37 million email addresses from around 810,000 Android devices.

The group also earned approximately 3.9 million dollars by running a fake dating site. Spam used to lure victims to the dating site was sent to the addresses collected by the android malware.

In Symantec’s investigation, the malware was first discovered on September 2012 where it steals information and sends it back to hacker’s computers. It was April 2013 when the operation ended when authorities raided the scammers office.