Romanian police arrested 70 suspects Tuesday who they claim were involved in eBay scams and other cybercrimes since 2006.
Believed to be members of three separate gangs, the scammers used phishing attacks to get the login credentials of eBay account holders, then used the accounts to auction nonexistent goods. Police have identified approximately 800 victims who sent money for non-existent Rolex watches, cars, yachts, private airplanes and other luxury goods. Buyers from around the world lost an estimated $1 million after they sent money for winning auctions, but never received goods. According to one Romanian news source, an American buyer paid about $90,000 for a luxury aircraft in one auction.
The crooks allegedly operated in Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States. Police have so far recovered only a small, undetermined amount of money in the raids. Romanian authorities posted a video of one of the police raids on YouTube (above).
Suspects in several countries reportedly exchanged homes, cars and phone cards among themselves.
The investigation, dubbed Operation Valley of the Kings, involved hundreds of law enforcement agents in multiple cities and more than 100 search warrants. It was a joint operation between the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Secret Service and the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organised Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT).
Thirty-one suspects were arrested in Bucharest and the rest were seized in other cities. According to one Romanian news article, a 22-year-old student at the University of Transylvania in Brasov was among those arrested after police raided his dormitory. Related arrests also occurred in the Czech Republic.
A New York man was sentenced to three years imprisonment in connection to bank fraud charges for his role in a scheme that compromised online banking and brokerage accounts, the authorities said Wednesday.
The sentencing of Aleksey Volynskiy marks the second defendant sentenced in the fraud that netted the defendants hundreds of thousands of dollars. A third suspect, federal prosecutors and the Federal Bureau of Investigation said, is Alexander Bobnev, a Russian whom they said remains at large.
The authorities broke up the 15-month-long caper in 2007, in which the trio conspired to infect U.S. banking consumers with Trojan horses that let the gang swipe the victims’ login credentials.
Bobnev, the authorities said, initiated wire transfers from the hacked bank accounts, liquidated stocks from compromised brokerage accounts and channeled the money to “drop” accounts in the United States.
Opening the drop accounts and pulling out the cash was allegedly the job of Volynskiy and Alexey Mineev from Hampton, New Hampshire, who got to keep a portion of the loot for their efforts. Mineev was sentenced to 18 months in prison in November.
The scheme unraveled when the feds cultivated an informant in Poughkeepsie, New York. The informant gave the gang the routing number for a new drop account to send stolen funds — in actuality, the account was under law enforcement control. The feds watched as it received transfers of $15,400 and $4,700 from two hacked Charles Schwab trading accounts.
The informant then met with Volynskiy in Manhattan to give him half of the $4,700, according to the indictments.
The three were charged in New York federal court with conspiracy, and Volynskiy faced additional counts of access device fraud for allegedly giving the informant 150 stolen credit card numbers last year to get them programmed onto counterfeit cards.
