A California phisher was jailed for 12 years by a Californian court for his role in an international scam that cheated more than 38,000 people.

Tien Truong Nguyen, 34, worked with Romanian scammers to help drive people to the sites through email phishing.
The court was told that Nguyen sold the data containing the identities stolen from the fake sites to Ryan Price and Stefani Ruland. These two men then setup lines of credit at GE Capital kiosks at Walmart in Northern California.

Victims ended up paying between $1,000 and $2,000. These lines of credit were used to purchase goods at the store and resell the purchases. Nguyen, Price and Ruland got $200,000 in goods from Walmart.

Nguyen was arrested by police in 2007. In his house they found web templates to build fake versions of sites like eBay, Paypal and banks such as Washington’s Heritage Bank.

He had bank and credit card numbers from 38,500 victims, a Remington 870 Magnum Express shotgun with a supply of ammo. Normally it is the right of everyone American citizens to carry a gun, but Nguyen wasn’t allowed to have a firearm due to previous convictions from three felonies that included writing fraudulent checks.

He was charged with conspiracy, aggravated identity theft, possession of a firearm and access-device fraud. During sentencing, lawyers for Nguyen attempted to argue that he had cleaned up his life and stopped using meth which would have helped.