> So yeah. I wiped all his emails from all his accounts and he hasn't bothered us since. Pro tip: If you are going to steal peoples money at least use a different password for all your accounts.
Pro-tip: you did a great job wiping a great deal of evidence.
Disclaimer: I am someone who actually deals with this as a part of his line of work.
Of course I made copies of all the emails. It's a shame I can't read Portuguese.
The guy resides in Brazil (the other side of the world to me). Realistically what would have happened if I had contacted the Brazilian police about such an issue? Do you honestly think they would spend any resources on such a small player in the Cybercrime world? I contacted all the other companies he was renting from instead, which I thought was much more proactive.
E-mails are hosted on American servers and likely this affects other Americans (assuming you're one too).
You cannot waltz into an account that is not your own and make changes. It doesn't matter if the user is in Brazil or not, the United States and them have an extradition treaty signed back in the 1960s. If an American agency thinks that a Brazilian is involved in a serious breach, they'll make use of that treaty to the best of their ability. Don't forget about about the efforts made to try and get Gary McKinnon.
I don't care what altruistic goal you have here, you do not go and do this sort of thing. It's far from appropriate and you shouldn't go around trying to excuse it because they're of some nationality. You should not assume you have not compromised an investigation here.
Nothing is really deleted, the NSA already has a backup copy and I'm pretty sure Google would be able to retrieve this from archive should it be required from law enforcement.
But agree, he could have just snooped around to gather whatever info he needed and also notified law enforcement.
I don't have the numbers for Google, but companies like Microsoft host e-mail archives regardless of deletion for something like a year. AOL claims that it hosts it indefinitely, but it would be nice to know what Google does.
Pro-tip: you did a great job wiping a great deal of evidence.
Disclaimer: I am someone who actually deals with this as a part of his line of work.