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ROME (AFP) - Two cyber pirates have been arrested in Sicily after using the Internet to access some 1,000 US credit card numbers and going on a costly spending and gambling spree, Italy's financial watchdog said Saturday.
Italian Giuseppe Russo, 34, and his wife, Croatian Sandra Elazar, 33, started the scam after obtaining the numbers of some 1,000 credit cards from a Chase Manhattan bank in Wilmington, Delaware, and a Citibank Universal branch in Colombus, Georgia.
Over several months, they went on a consumer binge via the Internet, snapping up books, clothes and computer goods. The payments were spread out over different card numbers so as not to raise suspicions.
But in the last month, the pair began to play the lottery to transform the credit into cash. In all, they gambled away 1.5 billion lire ($774,600), and the winnings were paid into their own bank account.
"It was an efficient system, which guaranteed them gains, albeit inferior to the bets, but it was not their money they were gambling," the deputy prosecutor of Catane, where they were arrested, told a press conference.
Investigators that were alerted by a complaint from Italy's interbank services have still been unable to establish whether the pair stole the credit card numbers themselves or bought them from computer hackers.
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