An international law-enforcement crackdown on paid password cracking services has resulted in at least 11 arrests, including the operators of an alleged cracker-for-hire site in the US that prosecutors said compromised almost 6,000 e-mail accounts.

Mark Anthony Townsend, 45, of Cedarville, Arkansas, and Joshua Alan Tabor, 29, of Prairie Grove, Arkansas, ran a site called needapassword.com, according to court documents filed this week in federal court in Los Angeles. The site accepted user requests to hack into specific e-mail accounts hosted by Google, Yahoo, and other providers, prosecutors alleged. According to charging documents, the operators would break into the accounts, access their contents and send screenshots to the users proving the accounts had been compromised. The men would then send passwords in exchange for a fee paid to their PayPal account, prosecutors said.

"Through www.needapassword.com, defendant and others known and unknown to the United States Attorney obtained unauthorized access to over 5,900 e-mail accounts submitted by customers," a criminal information filed against Townsend stated. During the time of Tabor's involvement, needapassword.com broke into at least 250 accounts, a separate charging document claimed.

Federal prosecutors also charged three people in the US for paying for cracking services. One of them, John Ross Jesensky, 30, of Northridge, California, allegedly paid almost $22,000 to a Chinese website to illegally obtain account passwords, prosecutors said.

The charges are part of an international investigation into e-mail account takeovers. The investigation has also resulted in arrests in Romania, India, and China. Romanian authorities conducted searches on three residences associated with people running the websites zhackgroup.com, spyhackgroup.com, rajahackers.com, clickhack.com, ghostgroup.org, and emailhackers.com. Four people were arrested. It has been widely reported that a Romanian man was arrested this week under suspicion that he hacked into the online accounts of various public figures and politicians, including the family of former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, as well as former US Secretary of State Colin Powell. Romanian officials have yet to identify the defendants by name. Ars covered last February's hack of the Bush family here.

The arrests also came the same week feds arrested the founder of the now-defunct isanyoneup.com on charges that he paid a man to break into the e-mail accounts of hundreds of victims and steal sexually explicit images that later showed up on the notorious "revenge-porn" site. Prosecutors haven't said exactly how so many accounts were compromised, except to say the defendants connected to isanyoneup.com relied on social-engineering techniques that allowed the crackers to impersonate victims or victims' friends.