A restaurant worker is suspected of using the identities of some of America's richest celebrities to pull off the biggest theft in Internet history.

A restaurant worker is suspected of using the identities of some of America's richest celebrities and executives in a scam which local authorities describe as the biggest identity theft in Internet history. Abraham Abdallah, 32, a convicted fraudster, has been arrested, accused of infiltrating the financial accounts of over 200 people on Forbes magazine's annual list of richest people in the US.

His alleged victims include Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey from the world of entertainment, and Ted Turner, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg and Larry Ellison from the financial world. Abdallah is accused of using the web and his local Brooklyn library to track down confidential information and access bank, brokerage and credit card accounts. One piece of evidence found by the police was a well-worn copy of Forbes magazine with home addresses, telephone numbers, bank accounts and mothers' maiden names scrawled beside the billionaires' biographies. In several cases their all-important US social security numbers had also been written down.

Abdallah allegedly used web-enabled mobile phones and virtual voicemail services to track packages ordered in his victims' names and pick up messages from anywhere in the US. Detective Michael Fabozzi of the New York Police Department (NYPD) told the New York Post: "There were so many packages going to so many places at one time, it's impossible to figure out how he kept track of it all...but he did."

The department believes Abdallah cloned the identities of his victims, setting up hundreds of bogus New York addresses for postal deliveries, before raiding their personal accounts. The police, who arrested their suspect as he picked up a delivery a month ago, are still trying to discover the extent of the fraud, which they believe lasted more than six months. Abdallah has been charged with criminal possession of forged devices and stolen property, and criminal impersonation. He denies the accusations.

The case began in December when the NYPD was alerted to a suspicious request to transfer $10 million from an account belonging to Thomas Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems, an electronics firm. Merrill Lynch, the brokerage firm, had contacted Siebel about the request because it conflicted with the requirements of the account. He said he knew nothing about it. The fraud squad traced the request to two Yahoo! email addresses.

Merrill Lynch then found the same email used for five more billionaire clients. Requests to other Wall Street firms, which handle the personal accounts of America's wealthiest people, uncovered similar coincidences. The police found that many of the business addresses given to set up the accounts either did not exist or were shared by two billionaires at a time.