Police swoop on Web-cafe thieves

By Emma Dong  |   2008-12-10  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

EIGHT suspects have been taken into custody for hacking into system software at a string of Internet cafes and stealing from them, city police said yesterday.

Thirty-four Internet cafes in Pudong, Huangpu, Baoshan and Changning districts lost around 170,000 yuan (US$24,726), according to police.

Seven of those detained were employees at the Internet cafes, and one was an unemployed man.

Investigations started in October when police received a report from a local software company saying an accounting system developed by them for an Internet cafe had been breached. The company said the data in the software's database had been deliberately changed.

"The company's software is used by more than 90 percent of local Internet cafes," said Bai Hongwei, from the information security department of the city police.

The biggest loss was reported in the Liangli Internet cafe in Pudong, where two suspects allegedly stole about 120,000 yuan. A man surnamed Song, an unemployed Shanxi native, bought a hacking program on the Internet that could delete data in the Internet cafe's accounting system, and colluded with a cashier surnamed Gui, an Anhui woman, said Yin Weihua of Pudong police.

Song deleted the records of between 300 and 500 yuan worth of transactions each day. Gui took the money from the cash register, Yin said, and they split it.

Employees at 33 other cafes used similar methods to steal and cover their tracks. Most suspects only stole small amounts of money each day to avoid being detected, police officers said.

The person who wrote the hack has been caught in Shenyang City in Liaoning Province, said Bai.

After a warning by police, more than 1,000 Internet cafes have installed new software to prevent such hacks.