Russian national charged with $1.4 million hacking scam

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A Russian hacker faces federal and New York state charges that he used compromised online brokerage accounts and a fake job placement website to generate $1.45 million in profits.

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Should have just stayed in Russia, wouldn't be able to touch him there.
That's what most of them do, they stay in Russia and commit that many crimes and more and we can't reach them. Heck, they can poison people with polonium-210, head home, and never be charged.
Damn all that and he's only facing 5 years?.
roken wrote:
Damn all that and he's only facing 5 years?.

Well come on, it's not like he was running a file locker site. :)
As I read it, the mechanics of both scams required the scammers to have bank or brokerage accounts in the US.

These scammers were at least smart enough to realize that if they used their own bank accounts to receive the funds, they would quickly be wound up by law enforcement. Their solution was to recruit Kazakh students to set up bank accounts in the US, then get them out of the country before the police came knocking.

This scam couldn't have been pulled off from Russia or Nigeria, not entirely. They needed US bank and brokerage accounts to collect the funds. This is just one of the reasons you need to be in the US to set up a US bank account.

Could they have stayed in Russia and sent the students over? Maybe, but those students probably needed a lot of hand holding. They needed someone on the ground to physically walk the students through the process.

Even if the ringleaders had stayed in Russia, this is the sort of criminal that the Russia government will often throw to the wolves.
Dan Goodin wrote:

I don't understand this. So our hacker shorts, at $10, a stock that's currently worth $7 on the market. In doing this, he has lost $3. Minutes later he covers his short by buying the stock back at $8.50, gaining back $1.50 of the $3 he lost. But he's still $1.50 in the hole. How does this 'generate a profit'?

Are separate accounts used? The account that short-sells loses $3, but some other account buys the shorted stock, and thus gains $1.50?
7 posts