Two Russian citizens arrested in the US for organizing a cybercrime forum
Pavel Kublitskii and Alexandr Khodyrev were arrested and charged last week for their alleged role as administrators on a credit card fraud forum.
The FBI has revealed details of an investigation into a Russian-language card forum, which has led to the arrest of a pair of Russian citizens residing in the United States.
Pavel Kublitskii and Alexandr Khodyrev were arrested last week after the District Court for the Middle District of Florida granted an arrest warrant for the couple after the FBI presented the court with an affidavit outlining their criminal activity.
What makes the arrest particularly notable is that the two men had sought and been granted asylum in the United States in 2022. Despite being unemployed, the couple had been living lavish lifestyles, purchasing luxury apartments and sports cars.
However, before his arrival in the US, the FBI had already begun investigating the carding forum (criminal term for credit card fraud) known as WWH. In July 2020, the FBI linked the forum to American web hosting company DigitalOcean, and after serving a court order on the company, the bureau was able to obtain a full copy of the server hosting the illegal forum.
The FBI described WWH as “like a cross between eBay and Reddit.” It offered a wide range of criminal services while also providing message boards with “resources to help people use stolen credit card information and PII to make purchases and generate income,” according to the affidavit.
The site even ran a paid course that taught all aspects of credit card fraud and charged membership fees to generate its own income.
In 2023, the site had 353,000 users.
After studying the copied server, an FBI agent joined the site as a member in early 2023, enrolled in the paid training course, and even purchased the personal data of about 20 US citizens living in Florida, all in the framework of an investigation to determine the owners of WWH. This sparked a wave of search warrants executed on 95 email addresses linked to the forum’s administrators and moderators.
According to the FBI, “data obtained from these search warrants revealed that many of these email accounts are linked to each other and are used by KUBLITSKil and/or KHODYREV to administer the WWH Club, as well as for other purposes, including personal ones. ”.
FBI investigators also followed a cryptocurrency trail that linked 90 crypto payments to Kublitskii. Other transactions were related to Khodyrev.
It’s also worth noting that the forum and much of its communications were in Russian, and the FBI used Google Translate to understand it.
Kublitskii and Khodyrev were charged with conspiracy to traffic in unauthorized access devices and conspiracy to possess 15 or more unauthorized access devices. The couple could face up to 20 years in prison.
At the time of writing, the forum is still up and running on another hosting infrastructure.
