The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had recently reached its goal of indicting a total of a hundred phishing scammers with the help of the Egyptian government and about two years worth of investigation. As reported by Information Week, they've ultimately managed to crack a multinational phishing operation since they first took on the case (codenamed "Phish Phry") way back in 2007.

The FBI claims that the U.S.-based masterminds—Jonathan Preston Clark, Nichole Michelle Merzi, and Kenneth Joseph Lucas—hired a veritable army of scammers to create a multitude of bank accounts at Wells Fargo and Bank of America in order to better facilitate their phishing schemes. After the cash was extracted from these accounts, it was then sent via wire service to the Egyptian syndicate members minus the share of the pie reserved for the American ringleaders.

Fifty-three of those one hundred scammers will find themselves on American soil, while the rest of them—about forty-seven—are in the custody of the Egyptian government. So far, thirty-three of the fifty-three swindlers headed to the U.S. for trial have been arrested at the time of this writing, while the FBI is continuing the manhunt for the remaining twenty criminals. These defendants are all being charged with wire scamming as well as conspiracy to commit bank fraud, and are thusly facing up to two decades of imprisonment for their transgressions.

The Egyptian suspects had allegedly sent fake emails claiming to be genuine messages from banks that urged their victims to "update" banking records that don't need updating. By clicking on the links of such messages, recipients are led to a counterfeit website under the phishers' control, which will prompt them for their account name, password, credit card number, and so on. By entering their sensitive information, these unsuspecting targets are letting the scammers obtain their data for identity theft and bank fraud purposes.

According to the authorities, the fraudsters' mode of operation went about this way: First, the Egyptian scammers will collect the personal credentials and financial details of their marks and then send them to their U.S. bosses for posterity. Second, the latter would afterwards utilize this data to hack into victims' accounts, withdraw their money, and pass part of the loot to their comrades back in Egypt. From there, the cycle repeats, with millions, perhaps billions, of hard-earned dollars at stake in every recurrence.