LOS ANGELES, May 7: Over 24 Bar area residents, including a Pakistani couple, were arrested last month on suspicion of pirating $20 million in Microsoft softwares, local newspapers reported.

Eleven indictments were handed down on April 18 for 27 persons on various charges, including conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, money laundering and copy-right infringement, according to an official in the US Attorney’s office.

Mirza Ali and Sameena Ali were accused of pirating $1.5 million, according to the indictment. Ali’s firm Samtech Research Inc. was the base for vast criminal conspiracy stretching as far as Pakistan.

Federal agents uncovered hundreds of thousands of dollars in wire transfers from the sales. More than $60,000 were wired from just a Fremont bank alone to Karachi between June 2001 and March 2000.

FBI had arrested the Alis as part of the Operation Cyberstorm, a two-year under cover investigation of software pirating and related crimes that netted 27 suspects. The Alis are also accused of defrauding Microsoft Corp by concealing their identities. They used aliases and formed or bought new firms so they could continue to benefit from an academic discount programme they were banned from 1997.

Ali and other two, Keith Griffen of Oregon City and Willian Glushenko of Alameda, had been accused of buying over $29 million worth of software through the programme, selling it to non-academic sources, including several counterfeit software dealers.

Microsoft estimates the scam cost it $100 million.

In addition, the Alis also remain accused of laundering the proceeds from the operation, buying more than $430,000 worth of real estate in their son’s name and wiring more than $300,000 to Karachi, where Samtech is located.

Ali’s brother Zahid Ali and his wife Riffat Ali were also fugitive in the US, who fled in 1996.

In 1994, Mirza Ali the then CEO of University Systems Inc was banned from government contracting for two years because of fraud. Ali was still subject to that ban when his wife’s company Samtech won over $3 million in US Defense Department contracts.

A federal jury in 1999 found the couple guilty of using fake names and bogus applications to win the contracts.