The rock star fraudster

By Duncan Campbell

Posted on 10 May 2007 at 09:35

Top of the list of spurious websites was 'Keyzsexyplace', set up on 4 April
1999 by young Brazilian hacker Antonio Francisco 'Nino' Tornisiello, from Piracicaba, near Sao Paulo in Brazil.

Tornisiello penetrated Landslide's non-existent security screens, copied their programs and then constructed a high-speed fraud system to fire streams of stolen credit card information past the sign-up forms and fraud checks devised by Reedy and his programmers. By the time Landslide collapsed, he'd logged 3,181 sign-ups, most of them using stolen British credit card information.

'Tornisiello's hacking stood out like a sore thumb,' Bates told PC Pro. He took all the personal information, coded it as a single string and fired it in batches at Landslides upstream processing. 'The police experts couldn't have failed to notice it, if they were competent, but they claimed they saw nothing,' Bates says.

Among Tornisello's many British victims were prominent computer programmers and businessmen, some of them readers of this magazine. Some of them were lucky. The Operation Ore police haven't got round to knocking at their doors yet. Nevertheless, their names are now falsely listed in police files as suspected child abusers.

When confronted with our evidence, Tornisiello admitted to PC Pro that his Keyzsexyplace website had been a sham that held only 'a page with pictures of celebrities I found over the internet. It was nothing to do with child pornography.'

Tornisiello said he was 'choked' to learn that, because of his actions, innocent people have been accused of paedophilia. 'Everyone has something in their past they regret,' he said.

Pseudonyms have been used in this report to protect the real identities of "John Adam" and "Jeff Chapman"

Part 1: Fatal flaws in Operation Ore - the full story
Part 2: The secret videotape
Part 3: Carding rackets
Part 4: The Soprano Connection
Part 5: The minister and the FBI
Part 6: Wide-scale fraud
Part 7: The rockstar fraudster