Russia Fails To Stop Russian Hacker From US Charges

russia-fails-to-stop-alleged-hacker-from-facing-us-charges

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The Hunt is on and Russian Hackers are the ones being hunted relentlessly by US Government.

Targeted at every turn Russia tries desperately to protect its home grown hackers.

•Aleksei Burkov is a Russian national who was arrested in Israel and extradited to the US on charges of running an online criminal marketplace.
• Russia has been fighting for Burkov’s return, claiming he is wanted for internet fraud back home.
• In order to pressure Israel into returning Burkov, Russia arrested Naama Issachar, an Israeli woman travelling through Moscow.
• Issachar was sentenced to 7 years in prison, despite allegedly only possessing 9.5 grams of marijuana.
• Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has unsuccessfully appealed to Putin for Issachar’s release.

The repercussions over the custody and extradition of Aleksei Burkov a Russian hacker have set off a geopolitical maelstrom.
THE LEAST INTERESTING thing about the alleged Russian hacker who appeared Tuesday morning in a Virginia courtroom may end up being the charges he faces there.

The Justice Department indicted Aleksei Yurievich Burkov,a Russian hacker on five counts related to his alleged role from 2009 to 2013 in running an online criminal marketplace, CardPlanet, that sold stolen credit card numbers. The scale of CardPlanet, as online forums go, was relatively small—150,000 stolen payment cards that resulted in about $20 million in fraudulent purchases, a far cry from the bust last year of the reportedly $530 million “In Fraud We Trust” marketplace.

You can read the 2016 Burkov indictment in full below. On Tuesday, it was alleged that the 29-year-old former St. Petersburg resident used CardPlanet and another online forum to commit financial fraud. It outlines how much cybercrime now resembles legitimate online businesses and shopping sites. Burkov, the indictment alleges, sold card details for between $2.50 and $10 a card and even offered a literal money-back guarantee: He would refund the price of any cards that proved invalid.

He also provided an exceptional fee-based service, known as “Checker,” that lets would-be criminals instantly validate stolen card data. To keep out law enforcement, every prospective member of Burkov’s forum had to be “vouched for” by three existing members.

Arrested in Israel.

However, what separates Burkov’s case from run-of-the-mill online financial fraud is the geopolitics that have unfolded since he was initially arrested in Israel nearly four years ago. Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which in recent years has become ground zero for harbouring cybercriminals, has begun aggressively fighting to protect hackers that get caught overseas.

At the request of the US Justice Department and the Secret Service, which had been chasing CardPlanet’s owner, Israel initially arrested Burkov when he was vacationing in Israel with his girlfriend in late 2015. It was an early catch in the rising trend of Russian hackers caught while travelling outside Russia, often on vacation with girlfriends.

Most recently, in a case that still has US officials scratching their heads, one of the Internet Research Agency employees indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller for interfering in the 2016 presidential election was arrested in Belarus—not typically a country friendly to Western law enforcement—but then released and returned to Russia.

Russia promptly stepped in as the US began to push for Burkov’s extradition through the Israeli legal system. It filed its own competing extradition request, saying that Burkov was wanted back home for internet fraud as well—a Russian tactic that has become commonplace in recent years. (The ploy sometimes works; last year, a Greek court sent an alleged Russian hacker arrested there back to Russia instead of the US.)

It took until 2017 for an Israeli district judge to rule that Burkov should be sent to the US for trial, but Burkov appealed. Only this summer did the Israeli Supreme Court finally uphold the earlier ruling.

Russia retaliates.

As Burkov’s case dragged on, Russia moved to make Israel think twice about handing him over to the US. In April, Russia arrested a 26-year-old Israeli woman, Naama Issachar, as she was in Russia en route to Israel from a yoga retreat in India. Issachar grew up in New Jersey and moved to Israel at 16.

She was detained after Russian authorities said they found 9.5 grams of marijuana in her possession; her detention and the criminal charge seemed odd, given that another US woman caught with twice as much marijuana at the St. Petersburg Airport this summer was let go with a $235 fine.

Similar cases have met with less than a month of jail time. It quickly became clear that the Russian government was linking Issachar’s issue to Burkov’s. The Russian prosecutors upgraded the charge from drug possession to drug smuggling, a much more severe crime that—again—seemed at odds with the tiny amount she’d been charged with possession.

“During her detention, there were many strange things, one after another, like a domino effect,” Issachar’s friend Dor Tzur, who runs a Facebook page devoted to her release, told Haaretz. “It started with people saying, ‘if you want Naama released, he has to be released too.'”

Her case became a cause célèbre in Israel, especially as its political upheavals left Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu trying to score public victories. Still, Netanyahu’s pleas to Putin for a pardon have gone unheeded.

As the fall unfolded and the Israeli authorities moved to extradite Burkov, Issachar was hit with a heavy prison sentence: more than seven years in a Russian prison. “The punishment being demanded by the Russian prosecutor is disproportionate and does not fit the nature of the offence being attributed to Issachar,” Netanyahu’s spokesman said after being sentenced.

During what her family members said appeared to be a staged visit in October, Russian officials inspected Issachar’s prison conditions, and she spoke of how well she was being treated.
Russian media, meanwhile, has portrayed Burkov as merely an “IT specialist” and reported that Burkov was being mistreated by Israeli authorities, even being deprived of “food and water.” Russian media and diplomats repeatedly floated the idea that Burkov a Russian hacker should be traded, in a Cold War–style spy swap, for Issachar.

US Extradition.

Recent weeks made it clear that Israel wouldn’t budge on Burkov. He arrived early Tuesday on a flight from Israel at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, DC.
By the afternoon, he made his first appearance in the Eastern District of Virginia courtroom.

The Russian government had switched to blasting the US, posting on Facebook that America had “unleashed a hunt for our citizens across the world,” adding that Russian diplomats would visit Burkov in jail in Virginia and were in touch with Burkov’s relatives in Russia.

The statement was almost a carbon copy of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s protests after alleged cybercriminal Dmitry Ukrainsky was arrested in Thailand in 2016: “The American authorities continue the unacceptable practice of ‘hunting’ for Russians all over the world, ignoring the norms of international laws, and twisting other states’ arms,” it said then.

What, if any, impact Burkov’s extradition will now have on Issachar’s seven-year sentence remains unclear.

 

 

 

 

source https://www.amicusint.ca/russia-fails-to-stop-russian-hacker-from-us-charges/