As it became known to Kommersant, a high-profile criminal case of an alleged organized crime community of hackers of 26 people led by businessman Alexei Stroganov has been submitted to the military court. It is not yet clear whether the process will start on the merits: the defense plans to return the case to the prosecutor due to serious, in its opinion, shortcomings. According to lawyers, during the 2.5 years of the investigation, not a single victim of the activities of hackers was found, and they caused damage to the US banking system. Mr. Stroganov, according to investigators, did try to destroy the hegemony of the dollar.
After the accusation was approved, First Deputy Prosecutor General Anatoly Razinkin sent the materials of the criminal case to the 235th Garrison Military Court of Moscow. This is due to the fact that one of the defendants in the case at the time of its initiation was an active serviceman.
In total, 26 people will appear before the court, 16 of them have been in custody since March 2020. The defendants are charged with illegal circulation of means of payment (part 2 of article 187 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) and membership in an organized crime community (part 2 of article 210 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), and the investigation considers six of the accused to be the organizers of the OPS, charging them with part 1 of the corresponding article . Only one alleged hacker, Andrei Yushkovsky, who performed technical functions in the group, pleaded guilty to the crimes. He entered into a pre-trial agreement with the Prosecutor General’s Office, pleaded guilty, testified against his likely accomplices, and was sentenced to a suspended sentence. All the rest insist on their non-involvement in the crimes.
Most of the accused were arrested in March 2020 after a large-scale special operation of the FSB of the Russian Federation, carried out in 11 regions of Russia at 60 addresses. The Tverskoy District Court of Moscow then arrested most of the detainees at the request of investigators from the Investigation Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. According to investigators, an international group of cyber scammers specialized in stealing bank card data from citizens of Russia, the CIS, Europe and the United States and has been operating since 2014. The criminals, according to the police, hacked into the computer networks of processing companies, hotels, supermarkets and restaurants with customer payment data stored in their databases. According to the police, the members of the OPS copied the bank card details received, and the dumps obtained in this way were sold through stores organized by accomplices in the shadow sector of the Internet.
It is interesting that the price of one dump, according to the investigation, averaged about $20, but given that transactions were made in the hundreds and even thousands, the turnover of the OPS as a whole amounted to millions of dollars.
The organizer and leader of the group, the investigation considers 51-year-old businessman from the Kaluga region Alexei Stroganov, known among the so-called carders under the nickname Flint24. His first term for scams with bank cards – six and a half years – he received in the summer of 2006 by the verdict of the Lublin District Court of Moscow. The court recognized him as a member of a hacker group led by Ukrainian Artur Lyashenko, whose members produced at least 5 thousand fake Visa, Mastercard and American Express cards, which were then sold in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, France, Germany and the USA . Their use, according to the TsOS FSB, caused “significant damage to banking and payment systems.” Meanwhile, at the beginning of 2008, the convict was released on parole. In the wild, Flint became an expert in the field of cybersecurity, protecting banks and government agencies from hacker attacks. A film was made about his unusual life path and a book was written, and in December 2019, three months before his arrest, the expert was awarded a diploma of the President of Russia “For active social work.”
The investigation considers the owner and director of the sea club in Yalta Vitaly Akhmetov, better known as the leader of the Crimean public organization “People’s Unity”, created in 2014 to support the referendum on the entry of the peninsula into Russia, another active participant in the OPS. His lawyer, Lev Glukhov, told Kommersant that Mr. Akhmetov has been in custody for more than three years, although his role in the alleged OPS has not been determined. “My client is generally far from computer activities,” the defender explained. “He was engaged in renting out yachts and jet skis in Yalta and organized holidays on the coast for Alexei Stroganov and his friends.”
According to Glukhov’s defense attorney, having familiarized himself with the materials of the criminal case, he and his colleagues noted numerous shortcomings. “The investigation, for example, names astronomical sums in the materials, but in reality there is not a single victim in the case,” the defender asserts. “It is believed that the defendants harmed the banking system by their actions. However, the criminal case does not mention Russian or even banks registered in the CIS countries – only credit institutions from the USA, France and Germany. The investigation did not make requests to any of these banks, so it is not at all clear whether copies of the bank cards that the investigation is talking about were made?
But, the lawyer stressed, the investigation believes that the accused Stroganov, by his actions, tried to destroy the hegemony of the dollar.
Lawyer Glukhov also noted that in such a complex and large-scale criminal case, the only fact of the sale of their “products” by the accused is mentioned. The lawyer did not want to go into the details of the deal, but explained that the income of the OPS registered by the investigation amounted to only $ 700, and this money was received as part of the so-called test purchase carried out by FSB operatives before the arrest of future defendants. According to the defender, all these shortcomings prevent an objective consideration of the case in court and the issuance of a fair legal decision, therefore, at the preliminary hearings, they will file a petition to return the materials to the prosecutor.