<div style="text-align: justify; "><span style="font-size: 1rem;"><b>The US department of justice (DOJ) said a Chinese national was arrested in an international operation on charges of creating and using malware that was used in cyber attacks, large-scale fraud and child exploitation.</b></span><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; "><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper reported today that the man, 35-year-old Wang Yunhe, was arrested in the city state on May 24.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Wang’s arrest follows last August’s high profile sweep of 10 Chinese citizens holding multiple nationalities charged with laundering more than US$2 billion through the Asian financial hub.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The department of justice said in a statement dated May 29 that Wang and unnamed others allegedly “created and disseminated malware to compromise and amass a network of millions of residential Windows computers worldwide”.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">From 2018 until July 2022, Wang received US$99 million from sales of the hijacked proxied IP addresses either in cryptocurrency or fiat currency, the DOJ said.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It said cyber criminals who bought access to the infected IP addresses then bypassed financial fraud detection systems and stole “billions of dollars from financial institutions, credit card issuers, and federal lending programmes”.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This includes fraudulent loss exceeding US$5.9 billion from 560,000 fraudulent unemployment insurance claims originating from compromised IP addresses, said the DOJ.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">“Wang used the illicitly gained proceeds to purchase real property in the US, St Kitts and Nevis, China, Singapore, Thailand, and the UAE,” the DOJ statement said.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It said Wang’s assets and properties included sports cars, more than a dozen domestic and international bank accounts, over two dozen cryptocurrency wallets, luxury watches and 21 properties across several countries.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Matthew S Axelrod, assistant secretary for export enforcement at the US department of commerce’s bureau of industry and security, said the case read like a screenplay. - Reuters</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">bnbd/fas</div>