By Kim Rahn
Staff Reporter

A high school student is suspected of illegally collecting personal data and pocketing money in a ``phishing’’ scam, police said Wednesday.

Investigators said they caught the 17-year-old boy, identified as Kim, on charges of setting up the nation’s first phishing Web site that posed as a local bank’s site and obtained personal financial information.

The scam is raising concerns about the security and trustworthiness of the popular Internet banking system.

Phishing, a new term made by combining the words private data and fishing, is a scam using spoofed e-mails and fraudulent Web sites to fool recipients into divulging personal data, including credit card numbers, account usernames and passwords and social security numbers.

According to police, Kim made a bogus bank Web site and stole personal information from 77 Internet users who visited the phishing site in February.

He allegedly accessed online game sites with the information and sold the users game items and cyber money worth 900,000 won. He reportedly told police that he is addicted to online games and needed money for games.

Considering that computer security programs easily detect ordinary hacking programs, Kim set up his program to appear to be a bank’s program verifying users’ names.

The program, once installed, terminated security programs of the users’ computers, police said.

Online banking systems have been considered safe from phishing scams. But Kim’s phishing program, which combined hacking and phishing, was designed to disclose almost all online banking information.

In the southeastern port city of Pusan, police booked a 15-year-old middle school boy without detention on charges of distributing methods of making bombs and weapons to people in their teens and 20s on an Internet site.

The student, identified by his surname, Kim, opened a Web site named ``Arms Maker’’ last October under his father’s name and has shared methods of privately making bombs with some 1,500 site members, according to the police.

Police closed the site in June, but Kim immediately reopened it and has collected 130 members again so far.

The Web site provided details on how to make various bombs and weapons, including butane gas bombs, hydrogen peroxide bombs and bows and crossbows from materials that people can easily obtain, such as butane gas, lighters and wooden chopsticks.

The police investigation proved that butane gas bombs and a hydrogen peroxide bombs, which can be made with hydrogen peroxide and a thermos, have a great propensity for damage.

Kim wrote down detailed warnings about the bombs on the Web site, such as, ``The bomb is very dangerous, so you had better run away quickly before it explodes.’’

Kim reportedly said that he translated a foreign Web site introducing bomb-making methods into Korean and put the articles on his site. He also said he has made the bombs himself several times.

rahnita@koreatimes.co.kr