Thirty-eight people in U.S and Romania have been charged Monday with stealing personal information of consumers and financial institutions.

Law enforcement officials discovered a global crime ring, which was stealing names, Social Security numbers, credit card data and other kinds of information.

Phishing involves sending fake official e-mails that apparently come from banks, convincing recipients to go to a fake website and enter their account numbers. Phishers sometimes include attachments that secretly install “spyware” that can find personal information and send it to third parties over the Internet.

"International organized crime poses a serious threat not only to the United States and Romania, but to all nations," Deputy Attorney General Mark R. Filip said in a statement from Bucharest, as quoted by the Associated Press. Filip said that criminals “who exploit the power and convenience of the Internet” were an international problem, so the efforts to prevent their attacks should not end at the borders of the affected countries.

The Romanian members of the organization collected the victims’ data and sent it to cashiers in the U.S. through Internet chat messages, the Department of Justice said. The data was then encoded onto magnetic strips for credit and ATM cards. The group sent more than 1.3 million spam e-mails in one fishing attack.

More than half of the charged people are Romanian, but the scam operated from the United States, Canada, Pakistan and Portugal.