It never ceases to amaze me how far people will go to get money out of big business. Take the story of Shaun Harrison, 19, and Saverio Mondelli, 20, of New York, who tried to extort $150,000 from the social networking site, MySpace.

Straight out of high school, the two set up a business which offered code that tracked users who visited a MySpace page. The code which they sold for $30 on their website, myspaceplus.com, would collect personal information, e-mail contacts, and IP addresses; using this data, one could potentially find further information such as a individual’s address or telephone number.

After a year of operation, Mondelli and Harrison claimed to have over 85,000 registered users of their tracking program. MySpace had recently contacted the two with a notice to cease and desist; however, the N.Y. lads told MySpace that “they would not cease and they would not desist, and they were developing a new tracker they could not block,” said Jeffrey McGrath, deputy district attorney for Los Angeles County.

The two men decided to reach an agreement with Myspace; the deal was to offer a “consulting service” to Myspace for $150,000 and, in addition, they would no longer offer the tracking service to their customers.

To their surprise, MySpace agreed; however, it was only part of an undercover sting run by Los Angeles District attorney investigators and the Secret Service.

In May of 2006, the two took flight to L.A. to collect their $150,000, but ended up being arrested by undercover agents instead.

“With this particular case, the nature of the actions caused MySpace a lot of concerns,” says Deputy District Attorney Jonathan Fairtlough. “The individuals were young, but this was a sophisticated attack.”

Harrison and Mondelli pleaded no contest to the charge of unauthorized computer access on Monday; two counts of attempted extortion and another unauthorized access charge were dropped, according to L.A. district attorney McGrath.

The court mandated that the two men pay restitution of $13,500 to Myspace, and serve 160 hours of community service. In addition, they will not be allowed more than 1 e-mail address, they cannot sell identifying programs, and they must run monitoring software on their machines.

Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer for MySpace, said, “We are pleased with outcome of this case and hope that it sends a message to anyone thinking about causing harm to the MySpace community.”

Related:

Entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 6:39 am under Internet, Legal.

Read more entries by George Gardner.
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