A 23-year-old college student was arrested Thursday and charged with staging one of the biggest financial hoaxes ever on the Internet and pocketing almost $250,000 by issuing fraudulent information on technology company Emulex Corp.

A 23-year-old college student was arrested Thursday and charged with staging one of the biggest financial hoaxes ever on the Internet and pocketing almost $250,000 by issuing fraudulent information on technology company Emulex Corp. Officials of the U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI named the man as Los Angeles area resident Mark Jakob and said he was able to stage his hoax last Friday by sending a false press release via e-mail to news dissemination service Internet Wire Inc., where he had worked until a week earlier. They said Jakob had played the market in Emulex stock and stood to lose almost $100,00 unless ``he created his own bad news about the company.'' He did that by sending an e-mail to Internet Wire, pretending to be from Emulex Corp., saying that the data networking equipment company was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and was about to restate its earnings. The false release also claimed that the company's CEO had quit. Internet Wire, believing the release genuine, then filed it where it was picked up by several major financial news services, including Bloomberg and Dow Jones. The false news of the firm's dire financial straits sent investors into a panic, plunging Emulex's market capitalization by $2.5 billion in a matter of minutes, cutting the stock price by nearly half. Immediately after Emulex shares began to decline the FBI and the SEC began tracing the e-mail traffic of Internet Wire.