The Tel Aviv newspaperHa`aretz reported the five teenagers were charged with "willfully causing damage to computers belonging to companies and private individuals, including the American space NASA, both in Israel and abroad, by writing and disseminating computer viruses over the Internet." One teen is charged with actually writing the virus and four are charged with deliberate distribution of it. The teens confessed that earlier attempts to create a successful virus had failed, and thus they wrote the Goner worm with code from the Melissa virus to exploit email's rapid deployment capabilities.

David M. Smith, the author of the Melissa virus, was finally sentenced in March 2002, nearly three years after releasing the worm. Smith received a mere twenty months in jail for a virus estimated to have caused $80 million in damage. Perhaps the Israeli youths, who are currently facing three to five years imprisonment in Israel, should request extradition to the United States where they might expect to receive a lighter sentence. After all, Smith's U.S. sentence works out to about $4 million a month. Since Goner is estimated to have cost companies a paltry $5 million total in damage costs, one month's sentence for the teens would be comparable punishment in America.