An Italian citizen, employed in London’s publishing marketplace, has refuted prices that he fraudulently received unpublished manuscripts by impersonating other people on-line.
The United States Department of Justice unsealed an indictment on January 5 accusing 29-yr-aged Filippo Bernardini of working with electronic deception to amass the unpublished manuscripts of hundreds of publications.
“Filippo Bernardini allegedly impersonated publishing market persons in get to have authors, together with a Pulitzer Prize winner, send out him prepublication manuscripts for his possess profit,” said US attorney Damian Williams.
It is alleged that from at least August 2016 via July 2021, Bernardini made fake email accounts which he made use of to impersonate real literary expertise agencies, publishing houses and literary scouts.
“Bernardini established these accounts by registering a lot more than 160 internet domains that have been crafted to be confusingly very similar to the true entities that they ended up impersonating, including only minor typographical faults that would be tricky for the typical recipient to identification throughout a cursory evaluation,” said the US Attorney’s Business for the Southern District of New York in a statement.
One tactic allegedly utilized by Bernardini was to substitute the letter’ m’ utilised in a real area name with the decreased-scenario letters’ r’ and ‘n’ when registering a appear-alike domain.
Reportedly among the list of individuals allegedly defrauded by Bernardini are American actor, director and screenwriter Ethan Hawke, and renowned creator of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood.
Bernardini is additional accused of phishing two staff of a New York Metropolis-primarily based literary scouting corporation to achieve access to a databases managed by that corporation.
The defendant was arrested at John F. Kennedy Global Airport on January 5. He was charged with 1 rely of wire fraud and just one count of aggravated id theft.
Pursuing the allegations, Bernardini was suspended from his placement at the Uk arm of the American publishing business and ViacomCBS subsidiary, Simon & Schuster.
In a statement released Wednesday, Simon & Schuster explained it was “shocked and horrified” by Bernardini’s alleged crimes.
On Thursday, Bernardini entered a plea of not guilty before Manhattan federal courtroom. Judge Lewis Liman set bail at $300,000 and reported Bernardini could be introduced the moment he experienced been placed underneath electronic checking.
Some parts of this article are sourced from:
www.infosecurity-magazine.com