The FBI said Monday that Internet fraud complaints had spiked 33 percent year-over-year in 2008.

In Nicola-Roman's case, prosecutors said they found 2,600 credit and debit card numbers in e-mail accounts linked to him, and that he had probably harvested more information. He set up a fake phishing site to snare customers of People's Bank in October 2005, but also had tools that would have allowed him to phish customers of Wells Fargo, Suntrust, Amazon.com, PayPal and eBay, according to court documents.

He doesn't appear to have written software himself, but assembled a large collection of online fraud tools, including a program called Web Data Extractor, which harvested e-mail addresses. He sent spam to victims using a program called Email Sender Express, which could send 30,000 spam messages per hour, and created counterfeit cards using a program called T2Gen, prosecutors said. Another program, called WebZIP Unlimited, could be used to counterfeit legitimate Web sites.

According to data supplied to prosecutors by People's Bank, 78 of the 88 People's Bank card numbers that investigators found in Nicola-Roman's possession had been used for fraud. Nicola-Roman was able to take an average of US$960 per card number collected, prosecutors said.

Nicola-Roman, a clothing salesman by trade, committed the fraud in part to help pay for medication and support for his sick mother, according to his defense attorney.