A 20-year-old student has been arrested at an Internet cafe in Thessaloniki after he allegedly sent messages to hundreds of thousands of e-mail addresses, telling them they had won money and needed to pay over $3.20 (2.36 euros) to collect their winnings, police said yesterday.

The unnamed suspect, an information technology student, is believed to have sent a message to 400,000 recipients on Friday saying they had won $221.65 (160.87 euros) and that they could collect their money by paying a small fee for the transfer costs.

The suspect is believed to have broken into an e-mail account of a foreign financial institution in order to send his messages in a manner that showed them to have originated from the bank.

In addition, police confiscated a data memory stick that contained details of his victims and also included images of a fake identification card the suspect had prepared in order to open up a bank account where he could collect the money.