Two Moscow investigators have been charged with extorting the equivalent of $181 million from suspects
FILE PHOTO. © Global Look Press / Thomas Trutschel
A Moscow Region court announced on Thursday that it is set to hear the biggest bribery case in Russia’s modern history and in which Investigative Committee staff are the prime suspects.
At the time, the Russian law enforcement was cracking down on the Russian branch of an international cybercrime syndicate known as the Infraud Organization.
According to court documents, one of the men – major Marat Tambiev from the committee’s Moscow district branch – demanded that the hackers pay him 2,718 bitcoins. The sum is equivalent to roughly $181 million in current bitcoin prices. According to the Russian media, that makes it the biggest known bribe in Russia’s modern history.
The group was involved in the trafficking and unauthorized use of credit card data, the theft of personal credit card and online banking information, and the illegal trade of that data. The syndicate members – detained in Russia in 2022 – caused some 1 billion rubles ($11.4 million) in damage and fraud, according to the authorities.
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Another suspect in the case – an investigator identified as Kristina Lyakhovenko – is accused of illegally taking several data storage devices used by the hackers and seized by law enforcement officials – and handing them over to Tambiev, who then transferred the bitcoins stored on the devices to his crypto wallets.
In return, the suspects promised not to confiscate the rest of the hackers’ cryptocurrency assets worth 14 billion rubles ($159.6 million), which should have been forfeited in favor of the government, according to the Russian media.
The cybercrime syndicate members, who were all eventually sentenced to between two and a half and three years behind bars, but only in the form of suspended sentences, reported the bribe to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB).
Tambiev was then arrested in March 2022. Both he and Lyakhovenko denied wrongdoing.
The Infraud Organization was founded in 2010 by a Ukrainian national, Svyatoslav Bondarenko. The US Justice Department stated in 2017 that the group had over 10,000 registered members all over the world and was the “largest cyber fraud enterprise” prosecuted by the US authorities.
In 2018, the US indicted 36 suspected members of the organization for their alleged roles in the group’s “racketeering conspiracy.” According to the Justice Department, the group’s criminal activities resulted in losses of $530 million.