Flint24: the court returned the carders case to the Prosecutor General's Office

[Carding]

The 2nd Western District Military Court demanded that the violations in the case of the theft of millions of dollars from bank cards be eliminated.

On August 1, the 2nd Western District Military Court returned the case of a group of carders led by Kaluga businessman Alexei Stroganov (known under the pseudonym Flint24) to the Prosecutor General's Office to correct violations, lawyer Kirill Petryashev said.

According to investigators, an international hacker group has been stealing bank card data from residents of Russia, the CIS, Europe and the United States since 2014. Hackers hacked computer networks of processing centers, hotels, supermarkets and restaurants, where customer payment card data was stored. The criminal community controlled a significant part of the shadow market of means of payment, the indictment says.

According to the investigation, the group sold dumps through the honeymoney21cc.com website - information that is recorded on the magnetic stripes of payment cards. Also, during a test purchase, unknown people sold information about the details of payment cards - numbers, expiration dates, information about the holder, as well as CVV and CVC codes. This data was sufficient to make payments for goods and services in online stores and for money transfers.

Stroganov and his accomplices are charged under articles 210 (creation of a criminal community) and 187 (illegal circulation of payment means) of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. In total, 26 people appear in the case, 24 of them were detained in March 2020. Subsequently, the preventive measure was relaxed for eight defendants who were placed under house arrest. In December 2021, the Prosecutor General's Office returned the case for further investigation.

 

[Carding]

For three years, the Ministry of Internal Affairs conducted a case on a hacker group of 26 people, but all in vain - the court returned it to the prosecutor's office. No one noticed a small detail: there is a military man among the suspects, so the department simply could not investigate.

Back in the spring of 2020, the security forces identified carders who were stealing bank card data (for example, by hacking hotel chains or supermarkets) in order to sell them later. As a result, the cybercriminals ran into a test purchase from the FSB - the employees met with them right in the Kaluga hotel, paid $265 and immediately detained the merchants. After that, the special service conducted a large-scale operation in eleven regions and covered the entire group of 26 people, including its alleged leader, Kaluga businessman Alexei Stroganov, known as Flint24.

According to investigators, carders have been working since 2014 and stealing data from residents of the CIS, Europe and the USA. Moreover, the hackers had a well-built organizational structure with divisions - among them, for example, were "suppliers" and "sellers" of means of payment, as well as a "competitors elimination group". The latter, according to investigators, worked under the guise of the Kibalchish NGO - formally, she fought against cybercrime, but in fact she was looking for similar carder sites and wrote complaints to regulators about them so that they blocked Flint24's competitors.

Investigators of the Ministry of Internal Affairs have been working on this case for the last three years. True, with a turnover of millions of dollars, cybercriminals were charged with damage only for the same $265 from the FSB - they simply did not find other means. Nevertheless, hackers were threatened with articles on the illegal circulation of payment means, the organization of a criminal community and participation in it. But they did not succeed in punishing them: it turned out that among the 26 suspects there was one military man, and for all three years the case was supposed to be conducted by the military investigation department, and not by the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Oddly enough, this trifle was not noticed either in the department or in the Prosecutor General's Office, which approved the charge. Now the court has returned the case, and the investigation will have to be carried out almost from scratch - but to other employees.