A Los Angeles computer security consultant agreed Friday to plead guilty to using computer spyware that he planted in other people's computers to steal identities, U.S. federal prosecutors said.

    John Schiefer, 26, was accused of using "botnets" -- armies of infected computers -- to steal the identities of victims across the country by extracting information from their personal computers and wiretapping their communications, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office here.

    This is the first time someone in the United States has been charged under the federal wiretap statute for conduct related to botnets, prosecutors said.

    Court documents outline a series of schemes in which Schiefer and several associates developed and distributed a malicious computer code to vulnerable computers.

    Schiefer and the others used the illicitly installed code to assemble armies of up to 250,000 infected computers, which they used to engage in a variety of identity theft schemes.

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