The National Computer Crimes Squad arrested Kevin David Mitnick in February 1995, based on a criminal complaint in the Eastern District of North Carolina charging him with intrusion activity. Mitnick has pled guilty to charges in the Eastern District of North Carolina. The FBI's criminal investigation is continuing and the FTC has taken civil action. The illegal activities included trade not only in commercial software but stolen credit card and calling card numbers, theft of phone services and the spreading of destructive programs such as a computer virus. In addition to the above schemes, traditional financial crimes, such as multi-level marketing frauds, investment frauds, stock manipulations, credit card frauds, and copyright violations, as well as gambling, have simply found a new medium in the Internet.
Investment frauds comprise a vast amount of the financial crimes identified on the Internet.
Another area of crime that is experiencing a reemergence is gambling. A Northeast FBI field office has conducted search warrants on two suspected Internet gambling operations. The operations purported to be domiciled in an offshore location but actually were located in the suburb of this Northeast city. The Internet is a collection of computer networks in nearly every country which share a format for routing to a computer, data from any other computer connected to one of these networks with connections made in part via telephone lines. A recent study conducted by Nielsen Media Research and CommerceNet concluded that in the United States and Canada alone about 50.6 million people are now using the Internet.