MySpace extorters were applying for jobs
Teens sought MySpace jobs:
This is too rich. The two teens accused of trying to extort $150K from MySpace are now saying they were merely applying for jobs…
Two teenage Long Island computer programmers were trying to land a job with MySpace.com, not trying to extort the Web site, one of their attorneys said Friday.
The popular social networking site improperly lured Saverio Mondelli, 19, and Shaun Harrison, 18, to Los Angeles with the prospect of a consulting contract, said Mondelli’s lawyer, Michael Dowd of Manhattan.
And when they arrived in California last week and sat down for a business meeting with what they thought was a contingent of MySpace employees — who were actually Secret Service agents and local detectives — they were arrested without warning, Dowd said.
“The proposition to hire them as consultants was made by MySpace,” Dowd said. “This was a naked attempt to lure them into the lion’s den and to somehow make an allegation of impropriety against them.”
Harrison and Mondelli are partners in a Web site development company, Enxeo LLC, on Route 112 in Medford. A man who answered Enxeo’s telephone Friday, who declined to give his name, said of the two teens, “They’re young businessmen, good people.”
From the teenagers’ perspective, they hoped to profit from their invention of a useful computer program that allowed people to see the online identities of anyone browsing the MySpace site, Dowd said.
But the Los Angeles district attorney says that the two demanded $150,000 after hacking into MySpace, then threatened to release computer code that would undermine the site’s privacy guarantees.
Harrison, of Ronkonkoma, and Mondelli, a New York Institute of Technology student from Oakdale, pleaded not guilty and each faces a court date next month on two felony counts of illegal computer access and one count of attempted extortion, authorities said. They were released on $35,000 bail Thursday after spending six days in jail and are now “holed up in a hotel” in Los Angeles, Dowd said.
Months ago, the pair, 2005 graduates of Connetquot High School, retained a lawyer in New York to negotiate a consulting contract “concerning their technical expertise and their Web site,” MySpacePlus.com, Dowd said. But, he said, the company then used the ruse of a consulting contract to set them up for a fall.
“Mammoth Internet companies like MySpace.com don’t like competition, and they deal with the competition by squelching and stomping them,” he said.
If MySpace was trying to “crush the competition” they have pockets deep enough to buy them out and not waste law enforcement time by claiming extortion.
Defense lawyers continue to crack me up.
Related Stories
POSTED IN: Criminals
Recent Comments