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They’re not “Anonymous” anymore.
FBI agents yesterday raided a Brooklyn apartment and two Long Island homes as part of a nationwide clampdown on the cyber-hacking network known as Anonymous.
Federal authorities busted 16 people in 10 states and executed more than 32 other search warrants across the United States as part of the investigation into attacks by Anonymous against the PayPal online payment service in December.
PayPal was targeted after suspending accounts for the online group WikiLeaks.
Fourteen people were arrested and charged in connection with those PayPal attacks.
None of the people arrested lived in New York. But yesterday’s raid locations included an apartment in Brooklyn and homes in Baldwin and Merrick, LI.
In Baldwin, Giordani Jerome, a mechanic’s helper for Long Island Bus, said the FBI showed up because of computer activity by his 16-year-old son, Jordan, a high-school student whose computer hard drive was seized by agents.
“It’s all a big misunderstanding,” the elder Jerome said. “You know kids, how they go on a computer and they wind up somewhere on a site they shouldn’t be.”
“The feds have told him he’s all right, he did nothing wrong,” Giordani said.
In Merrick, at the home of the Shamanek family, residents refused to discuss why the FBI was searching the house.
“This morning, I woke up and saw five or six cars on the street. People were coming out carrying a lot of stuff in brown paper bags,” said Reginald George, 35, a neighbor of the Shamanek family, which includes 73-year-old widow Delores Shamanek and her son Frank Jr., 43.
In Brooklyn, at loft apartments at 255 McKibbin St. in Bushwick, a superintendent named José said he walked FBI agents up to search apartment 510, a now-vacant unit that a month ago was abruptly vacated by two men and two women. Several of those former residents belonged to a rock band called “Broken Glow.”
Inside the apartment, the FBI found only empty beer bottles and very dirty old clothes before leaving empty-handed, José said.
Whitney Laurence, a 26-year-old neighbor, said of the former residents, “The way they left was really sketchy.”
“They left their furniture out in the hall, and all these things you’d think people would want to take with them,” Laurence said. “They were just kind of a young rock band, pretty cool people, but they definitely moved out pretty quickly.”
Additional reporting by Mitchel Maddux, Joseph Mollica and Reuven Fenton