2 Britons arrested in theft of credit card data over Net

The FBI said it had assisted British and Canadian law-enforcement officials in the arrest of two 18-year-old British men in connection with the theft of more than 26,000 credit card numbers over the Internet.

The two were arrested Thursday in Wales and charged with violating the United Kingdom's Computer Misuse Act of 1990.An FBI spokesman said the names of the suspected computer intruders were being withheld under the terms of the British law.

An individual claiming responsibility for obtaining and publishing the credit card data had in recent months been in frequent contact with U.S. and European journalists. He said the break-ins were aimed at exposing the lack of security in commercial Web sites.

The FBI estimated that losses connected with the intrusions could exceed $3 million. The Philadelphia field office of the agency assisted in the investigation, but Jim Davis, a spokesman for the FBI, said he could not describe the agency's role because it might jeopardize the British case against the pair. He said it was unlikely that charges would be leveled against the pair in the United States.

Calling himself "Curador," the young computer intruder has spoken by telephone to reporters and claimed to be on a crusade to eradicate computer security weaknesses in online shopping services. As part of his vendetta against as many as nine small electronic commerce sites earlier this year he had begun begun posting thousands of stolen credit card numbers, addresses and expiration dates to public Web sites.

Among the sites Curador claimed to have stolen credit cards from were: www.shoppingthailand.com; www.promobility.net; www.ltamedia.com; www3.ntd.co.uk; www.visioncomputers.com; www.ascp.org; www.salesgate.com; and www.feelgoodfalls.com.

When notified that the credit cards numbers were posted on the Web Hosting Services last month several of the service providers said they had contacted law-enforcement agencies.

In a telephone conversation with a reporter last month, the British teen-ager Curador predicted his arrest. "There will be a knock on the door and I will be arrested," he said. However he claimed to be untroubled by the possibility: "A couple of days later I'll escape."