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BBC MUNDO RADIO
- By David Kravets
- April 7, 2010 |
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The sentencing of Aleksey Volynskiy brings to two the number of defendants sentenced in the fraud that netted the defendants hundreds of thousands of dollars. A third suspect, federal prosecutors and the Federal Bureau of Investigation said, is Alexander Bobnev, a Russian whom they said remains at large.
The authorities broke up the 15-month-long caper in 2007, in which the trio conspired to infect U.S.-based banking consumers with Trojan horses that let the gang swipe the victims’ login credentials.
Bobnev, the authorities said, initiated wire transfers from the hacked bank accounts, liquidated stocks from compromised brokerage accounts and channeled the money to “drop” accounts in the United States.
Opening the drop accounts and pulling out the cash was allegedly the job of Volynskiy and Alexey Mineev from Hampton, New Hampshire, who got to keep a portion of the loot for their efforts. Mineev was sentenced to 18 months in prison in November.
The scheme unraveled when the feds cultivated an informant in scheme in Poughkeepsie, New York. The informant gave the gang the routing number for a new drop account to send stolen funds into — in actuality, the account was under law enforcement’s control. The feds watched as it received transfers of $15,400 and $4,700 from two hacked Charles Schwab trading accounts.
The informant then met with Volynskiy in Manhattan to give him half of the $4,700, according to the indictments.
The three were charged with conspiracy, and Volynskiy faced additional count of access device fraud for allegedly giving the informant 150 stolen credit card numbers last year to get them programmed onto counterfeit cards.
Photo: myhsu/Flickr
