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StealthGenie — with prices ranging from $100 to $200 a year for a “Platinum” version — allows buyers to track nearly any movement or utterance of their target, underscoring the remarkable surveillance capabilities of iPhones, BlackBerrys and Android devices.

“The fact that it’s running in surreptitious mode is what makes it so foul,” said Cindy Southworth of the National Network to End Domestic Violence. “They work really hard to make it totally secretive.”

The chief executive of the company that makes StealthGenie, Hammad Akbar, 31, of Lahore, Pakistan, was arrested in Los Angeles on Saturday, according to a news release from the Justice Department.

A grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia indicted Akbar in August, and the case involves charges of conspiracy, sale of a surreptitious interception device and advertising a surreptitious interception device. That previously sealed indictment was announced Monday afternoon.

Court filings suggest that Akbar has contended that any legal issues were limited to the users of SmartGenie, not its maker. “When the customer buys the product, they assume all responsibility,” he wrote in a 2011 email, court filings show. “We do not need to describe the legal issues.”

Efforts to reach Akbar’s attorney, based in Los Angeles, were not successful.

“Selling spyware is not just reprehensible, it’s a crime,” Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said Monday in the news release. “Apps like StealthGenie are expressly designed for use by stalkers and domestic abusers who want to know every detail of a victim’s personal life — all without the victim’s knowledge. The Criminal Division is committed to cracking down on those who seek to profit from technology designed and used to commit brazen invasions of individual privacy.”