[Osiris]

Japanese 'Yahoo! phisher' arrested

Japanese police today arrested a man from Osaka who allegedly ran an Internet phishing scam based around a site called Yafoo.

The Yafoo site was, reportedly, almost identical to the popular Yahoo auction site. According to The Asahi Shimbun the man wasn't nabbed for tricking internet users into providing personal information, but - believe it or not - for violating the Copyright Law. The web site contained a logo owned by Yahoo Japan, but it said "Yafoo!" instead of "Yahoo!"

It is suspected that the man gained personal information on between 20 and 30 people who entered his site. The data was transmitted via mobile phone to the man's PC.

It isn't clear what the phisher intended to do with the data. Police suspect he may have illegally entered the real Yahoo auction site by pretending to be one of his victims. The suspect is in charge of data input and software operations at a company, police said.

Phishing is a fairly new phenomenon to Japan. Between April 2004 and March 2005 only 65 phishing sites have been set up in the country. Some Japanese phishers ran fake Internet sites by using the wireless local area networks (LAN) of others. These scams are extremely difficult to trace.