O’Neill called his Romanian counterparts and provided them with the information. In less than a day, they gave O’Neill the hacker’s identity: Adrian Tiberiu Oprea, a 26-year-old who had studied computer science and lived in the Black Sea port city of Constanta. Romanian authorities told O’Neill they were investigating Oprea for hacking retailers in Eastern Europe.
From the hackers’ e-mails and social media postings, O’Neill found the identity of one Oprea’s customers: a Romanian living in France named Cezar Butu, 27.
A third member of the conspiracy was harder to identify. In January 2011, O’Neill was examining more than 15,000 e-mails from an anonymous account when he found two that stood apart. They were from a personal e-mail and had attachments that were core to the scam: a program that masked the hackers’ activities in their victims’ computers, and a trove of stolen credit card numbers.
E-Mail Mistake
The hacker had mistakenly used his personal account to forward himself the information. The misstep was enough for O’Neill to finger Iulian Dolan, 25, a third Romanian.
O’Neill and the federal prosecutors still weren’t optimistic that they could put the Romanians on trial. Though the U.S. has an extradition treaty with Romania, getting the country to hand over suspects was far from guaranteed.
“I thought our best case scenario would be that we would approach Romanian law enforcement and hope we could convince them to prosecute these people, assuming we could ever able to identify them,” said Mona Sedky, a prosecutor in the U.S. Justice Department’s computer crimes division. “I never in a million years thought they would see the inside of a U.S. courtroom.”
O’Neill and his Romanian counterparts discussed his options, which amounted to taking the risk of trying to extradite the men, or finding a less official way to arrest them. “They basically said, ’Do whatever you can do legally to get them to the United States,’” O’Neill recalled.
Ladies Man
Research showed the thieves had obvious weaknesses: Dolan was an online gambler, and Butu was a ladies’ man. To capture Dolan, O’Neill became “Sarah,” a marketing specialist for a Connecticut casino who invited the Romanian to a poker tournament.