In a major breakthrough against cybercrime, a 35-year-old Chinese man, YunHe Wang, has been apprehended in Singapore, leading to the seizure of millions of dollars in assets. The raid on this global cybercriminal network, announced by the Justice Department on Wednesday, revealed a scheme that defrauded the US government of billions of dollars.

Wang is accused of being a crucial figure in assembling a massive botnet, a network of infected computers, which was utilized for various illicit activities, including bomb threats, dissemination of child exploitation materials, and financial fraud. The botnet was also exploited to submit a staggering number of fake applications for federal relief during the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to an estimated loss of approximately $5.9 billion.

The alleged extent of Wang's cybercriminal conduct and the luxurious lifestyle it funded drew comparisons to a Hollywood script. Senior US Commerce Department official, Matthew Axelrod, described it as a storyline straight out of a movie.

During the operation, law enforcement agents seized assets worth around $4 million, including high-end watches, sports cars like Ferrari and Rolls-Royce, and $30 million worth of real estate across East Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and the US. It was revealed that Wang had utilized the earnings from renting out the botnet to acquire these properties.

The multinational effort to dismantle the criminal network involved collaboration between authorities in Singapore, Thailand, and the FBI. Wang is currently facing extradition to the US, with no attorney listed in court records. Moreover, the investigation remains ongoing, as law enforcement agencies explore potential involvement of other suspects.

The cybercriminals employed virtual private networking (VPN) technology to spread malicious code, ultimately infecting an astonishing 19 million IP addresses worldwide, including over 600,000 in the US. These IP addresses serve as unique identifiers for individual devices connected to the internet.

This case represents yet another example of opportunistic fraud that has thrived in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Fraudsters capitalized on the federal economic stimulus package, the CARES Act, targeting it through their botnet. The scale of the problem was so severe that the Secret Service appointed a senior official as the National Pandemic Fraud Recovery Coordinator to mitigate the losses incurred.

The prevalence of such fraud continues to be a pressing issue. In March, the IRS disclosed that it had probed tax and money laundering cases related to Covid-19 fraud, potentially amounting to $9 billion. Significantly, more than half of these cases were opened within the past year, emphasizing the ongoing nature of this fraudulent activity.