By Jhoo Dong-chan
A court has given two men in their 30s suspended jail terms and fined them for committing Internet fraud by manipulating search-word rankings on Internet portal sites. They used a remote control program to takeover 100 computers across the country.
The Seoul Central District Court Monday sentenced one, surnamed Choi, to one-and-a-half years jail and three years probation, and the other surnamed Cho was given two years in jail and three years of probation.
It also fined them 320 million won ($275,000) and 1.2 billion won, respectively.
Portal companies Daum and Naver operate an “IP filtering” system to prevent keyword rigging in their search engines. But Choi and Cho operated the 100 computers through virtual desktop and remote control programs.
With the virtual desktop, they allocated four IPs to each computer, making search engines indicate there were 400 computers accessing their sites.
The two promoted a business and manipulated certain keywords to have higher rankings in search engines at the request of a businessman who wanted to promote his website.
For six months from November last year, they fabricated a total of 55,000 keywords and 22,000 Internet posts making it rank high on the portals’ search engines.