A hacker allegedly involved in a “bitcoin-for-cards” rip-off is coping with as a lot as 20 years in jail after being current in possession of a instrument containing substantial parts of stolen card numbers.
Vitalii Antonenko of New York Metropolis has been charged by the U.S. Authorized skilled’s Office for the District of Massachusetts, with the charges moreover carrying a most implausible of $500,000.
Antonenko was arrested at John F. Kennedy Worldwide Airport in New York in March 2020. He was apprehended by police after arriving from the Ukraine, the place he was found to be in possession of the unlawfully obtained card numbers.
The prosecution alleges Antonenko and his co-conspirators relied on SQL injection assaults to steal card data from weakly secured networks, which have been then provided on the darkish web.
Police have been alerted to Antonenko after investigating two BTC wallets that had been utilized in reference to transactions totaling $94 million. A minimum of $140,000 of that sum ended up in a private pockets sort out belonging to the individual.
Since 2014, Antonenko had been found to be exchanging the digital foreign exchange he obtained to those wallets for fiat by means of a third social gathering, with BTC being provided beneath market price.
Senior Specific Agent Peter Gannon acknowledged the sale beneath market value was in all probability essentially the most obvious causes for suspicion of cash laundering by means of Antonenko’s wallets.
Darknet digital foreign exchange operations have been a aim of regulation enforcement in newest months. Throughout the last couple of weeks, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Neighborhood advisable authorities for seizing some $22 million in digital foreign exchange from the darknet, whereas fairly a number of investigations into totally different sources of digital foreign exchange criminality are ongoing.
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