Russian Cybercrime Boss Burkov Gets 9 Years
Summary: Aleksei Burkov of St. Petersburg, Russia was sentenced on Friday to nine years in a U.S. prison after pleading guilty to running CardPlanet, a site that sold more than 150,000 stolen credit card accounts, and to founding DirectConnection, a secretive crime forum whose members included some of the most-wanted Russian hackers. Burkov was arrested in Israel in 2015 on an international warrant, was extradited to the United States in November 2019 after Russia imprisoned Israeli citizen Naama Issachar on drug charges in a bid to trade prisoners, and pleaded guilty hours before Putin pardoned Issachar in January 2020.
What's compelling: DirectConnection's roster reads like a most-wanted list: Maksim Yakubets, whose Evil Corp stole roughly $100 million and carries a $5 million FBI bounty, and SpyEye author Aleksandr Panin, sentenced to more than nine years, were both members. New York attorney Arkady Bukh said the government does not give nine years to defendants who cooperate, suggesting Burkov kept what he knows about that network to himself.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
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