The big news last week was that more than twenty people in Romania had their homes raided very early in the morning based on charges of stealing financial identities with fake bank sites and unauthorized access to NASA systems. Nearly a hundred officers performed the operation with FBI support in Timisoara, Lugoj, Caransebes, Hunedoara and Pitesti.

Stirile Pro TV has more details:

Although this is an impressive sweep, it brings to mind some other recent news. Gabriel Bogdan Ionescu was arrested in 2007 for cloning the Italian Post Office to steal identities and money. He was convicted and sent to jail but now Balkan Insights reports that the District Attorney in Como, Italy has allowed him to take a job.

Ionescu is to be hired part-time by a company specialized in monitoring and intercepting online criminal activity and which has been contracted by the Italian government to assist authorities with preventing online crimes, which are becoming increasingly common in Italy.

Will he will be working against his former colleagues who seem to have copied his methods? Perhaps more to the point, I wonder if the new twenty-two or so suspects get a similar offer and substitute for hiring Italian computer security experts? The ethics of hiring convicted criminals to fight crime has always been debated. In the case of Ionescu, it seems the application to a university in Milano helped turn things around for him.

He finished the test in a record one hour and 20 minutes and received the highest score in the history of the faculty. More recently, Ionescu received maximum scores on two student exams.

“He’s not just the best in his generation,” fawned one of his professors. “He’s probably the best on the planet.”

Although it’s very likely he is super intelligent, I still have to wonder about the chances that he cheated.