Two Vietnamese citizens and a Canadian have been charged over roles in hacking email service providers in the United States in one of the largest reported data breaches in the nation's history, the Department of Justice said on Friday. Viet Quoc Nguyen, 28, is charged with hacking at least eight email service providers between February 2009 and June 2012 and obtaining more than one billion email addresses. The service providers involved were not named. According to the allegations, Nguyen and fellow Vietnamese citizen Giang Hoang Vu, 25, used the data to send so-called spam to tens of millions of people directing them to products they were selling online. Hacked: The data breach compromised almost one billion email addresses across the United States from February 2009 to June 2012 . Both men resided in the Netherlands. Vu, who was extradited to the United States in March of last year, pleaded guilty on Thursday to conspiracy to commit computer fraud. Nguyen remains at large. The other defendant, Canadian David-Manuel Santos Da Silva, 33, was charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering. He is the co-owner of a company called 21 Celsius Inc, that allegedly struck up a marketing arrangement with Nguyen and Vu to generate revenue and launder the proceeds, according to the Justice Department. The two men made $2 million from sales on those products over two years. “Those individuals who line their pockets with money gained through deceiving others should know they will not go undetected and will be held accountable,” said Special Agent in Charge Veronica F. Hyman-Pillot of the IRS Criminal Investigation Division. Vu was taken into custody in the Netherlands in 2012 and was extradited to the US at the beginning of March. Arrests: Two men from Vietnam directed spam to Canadian, David-Manuel Santos Da Silva and the three men made more than $2 million . He has pleaded guilty to to conspiracy to commit computer fraud. Da Silva was nabbed by authorities in February at Ft. Lauderdale International Airport trying to leave the country. 'This case reflects the cutting-edge problems posed by today's cybercrime cases, where the hackers didn't target just a single company; they infiltrated most of the country's email distribution firms,' said acting U.S. Attorney John A. Horn. 'And the scope of the intrusion is unnerving, in that the hackers didn't stop after stealing the companies' proprietary data — they then hijacked the companies' own distribution platforms to send out bulk emails and reaped the profits from email traffic directed to specific websites.'
Two Vietnamese citizens and one Canadian man arrested for huge spam email con .