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A New Zealander alleged to be an international cyber-crime leader has been released by police without being charged.
The 18-year-old man had been interviewed by police in an investigation involving the New Zealand Police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Dutch authorities.
The man, known online as "AKILL", allegedly played a leading role in cyber-crime that resulted in an estimated $26 million-plus of economic loss.
Waikato Crime Services Manager Detective Inspector Peter Devoy said police were continuing their inquiries and would investigate the computer hardware they had seized.
Police had carried out searches at Canterbury, Northland and Waikato addresses.
Mr Devoy said as a result of inquiries the other addresses that had been searched were more likely to be victims in the cyber-crime not co-offenders.
The FBI in the United States believe AKILL is the ringleader of a "botnet" - in this case a cluster of more than a million computers infected by a malicious virus letting the perpetrator gain control of them, access private information and attack other computers.
He was alleged to have been part of an attack that crashed the computer server at the University of Pennsylvania.
An FBI agent who is in New Zealand as part of a crackdown on computer crime said "more arrests are possible", the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper reported.
US federal officials said the New Zealand connection to a computer server crash at the University of Pennsylvania's engineering school on February 26 last year denied service to 4000 students, faculty and staff.
Their investigation led to a bio-engineering student at the university, Ryan Goldstein, 20, who is alleged to have conspired with AKILL to use the university's computer system as a staging ground for a 50,000-computer attack against several online chat networks.
Goldstein is charged with using a fellow student's user-name and password to gain access to the university server, then using this access to help his New Zealand accomplice carry out computer attacks.
- NZPA
