Scott Levine, 45, of Boca Raton, Florida, ran Snipermail.com, an e-mail marketing company. But according to the indictment, Levine and Snipermail employees were also involved in a conspiracy to steal around 8.2 gigabytes of personal information from a computer database belonging to Acxiom Corporation.
Acxiom Corporation manages personal, financial and corporate data on behalf of some of the world's top firms, including IBM, Microsoft and leading insurance and credit card companies. It therefore holds a vast amount of personal information about individuals in the US and around the world.
In July 2003, while investigating an intrusion into Acxiom's database committed by Ohio resident Daniel Baas, investigators with the Sheriff's Office in Hamilton County, Ohio, discovered a second set or intrusions into the database.
Acxiom called in the FBI, the Secret Service and the US Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Working together the three agencies traced the source of the downloads to Snipermail's computer system, according to the indictment.
Further investigation suggested that, beginning in April 2002, individuals employed at Snipermail had obtained access to Acxiom's databases, and by spring 2003, started regularly accessing large data files and downloading them.
Levine and others actively concealed computers from investigators during the course of the investigation in order to hide their illicit activity and avoid prosecution, said the indictment.
"The protection of personal information stored on our nation's computer systems is critical to public trust in those networks and to the health of our economy," said Assistant Attorney General Christopher A Wray. "We will aggressively pursue those who steal private information from computer networks and make it clear that there are serious consequences for such crimes."
The Department of Justice praised Acxiom for notifying law enforcement quickly, and advised that there was no evidence that the stolen data had been used in any fraudulent scheme.