Jollier
Professional
- Messages
- 1,463
- Reaction score
- 1,458
- Points
- 113
Sergey Pavlovich starts a series of topics about his book "How I Stole a Million. Confession of a Repentant Carder" and about the development of Russian cybercrime in general. How and why this book was written, what reviews there are about the book, how Sergey Pavlovich was arrested and what crimes he was accused of, what a visit to the prosecutor who signs your arrest looks like, what is the difference between a search of premises and an inspection of premises, how fingerprints are taken, who are the witnesses and where are they most often taken, what does a temporary detention facility look like and what is it, who are the "broody hens" and what can and cannot be discussed with them, and much more.
Be sure to write your impressions in the comments, since "the first pancake is lumpy" and I will immediately respond and add/correct something in the following topics.
Enjoy reading!
Friends, hello!
During the period when I was a cybercriminal, I had a Mercedes E-class at that time, quite new, I had just bought it for 50-something thousand dollars. They put handcuffs on me, by the way, on one of all those present, and I understood that they came first of all, of course, for me. They searched the cars, took fingerprints from everyone, including the girls. I was accused of all these actions, and I understood that it was not enough, you asked me many times to tell about myself, who I am, what I am, what I do and so on. All these questions will be covered during a separate interview. A special person will come, a strong interviewer, a very girl, to my channel and we will answer all this about what I am doing now, there are many projects of mine, you basically know and I want to inform you that starting this week, there will always be not 2 but 3 releases on our channel, that is, we will now have a new release on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, that is, every two days you will see a new release on the channel, 2 will be with invited guests, and in one release I will tell you a little about my life before the moment you know me, what I did in the past. That's it. Therefore, please, I ask for your assistance, that is, watch carefully, write what was missing in the release, in which direction we should move, ask some questions.
That's it. Well, any feedback is important so that I understand that I don't need this alone, but we need it together. That's it. And I understood what can be improved and how we can make our releases and stories all about my book and in general about Russian cybercrime in general more interesting. But today I have a T-shirt that says Think about your past, and we will talk about who I was before and what I did.
And many of you know this book of mine, How I Stole a Million, from the story of the Repentant Carder, and this book probably covers more than a 10-year period of my life, the period when I was a cybercriminal who had achieved a certain success, that is, it is not for me to judge, because no matter what I say, you will say, you are a loser, and others will say, oh, you have achieved something. Therefore, if you are interested, listen and read. And it is with this issue that I want to begin a series of topics on my book, that is, we will go step by step through the chapters.
I will tell you 2-3 times more information than is presented on its pages, because there are some things I could not tell about at the time when I was writing the book. There are some things I could not tell because the volume of the printed edition is limited, and I simply did not have the physical ability to tell everything. And it seems to me that it is with this issue that we will begin, so to speak, the history of Russian cybercrime in general.
There will be about thirty issues, so don't switch over, recommend it to your friends, I think it will be interesting. Let's start with the preface. And I will say right away that the preface is the only thing in this book that I did not write, because at that time I was in prison, you see, serving a 10-year sentence in one of the Belarusian penal colonies, and at that time I was no writer, well, and we agreed with one of my girl friends that she, in principle, I would give her raw materials, drafts, and she would express them in some kind of artistic form. But then she got pregnant, she had other problems and concerns, and I had to write everything, having no experience in this, but 98% of the positive reviews speak for themselves and I hope that you liked it. I will sit for 10 years.
My beautiful wife will most likely leave me. My beloved grandfather, who raised me, will die without ever seeing me free. My mother will grow old, more from grief than from age. For my friends, I will become a ghost, with whom there is nothing to talk and with whom it is somehow awkward to share the joy of the birth of a child or impressions of a trip. I myself will change. I will become a psycho, with yellow skin and bad teeth. A moral monster, nervous, angry and cruel. My life can no longer be saved or changed.
But your destiny may be different. Why did I write this book at all? There were several reasons for that. Yes, one of them was that I wanted to gain some fame through the book, because I was really going to ask for a pardon from the President of the Republic of Belarus, which I, of course, later asked for, but it was ignored there, but I wrote it more for another reason, you see, that is, the book for me was like a diary, and when you end up behind bars, you have, well, there, especially if there is a girl waiting for you there and a bunch of other worries, naturally, you go a little crazy, you can say so, and the book was like a breath of fresh air for me, that is, I started a diary, I remembered some funny moments in the past, which happened quite recently. Your thoughts were carried away there, away from these gray walls, from these everyday troubles, often idiotic guards.
And, of course, for me it was an outlet. And then I looked, it seemed to be working out well, there was something to remember, there was even something to talk about, and accordingly I decided to add some more professional moments there, and this book came out. When I was writing it, I had, of course, a moral dilemma about whether it would be a guide to cybercrime, but I reassured myself that the information presented in it would be outdated by the time the book was published, that is, it would no longer be possible to commit the theft that my team and I constantly committed. Then I considered that everything that was presented in it was publicly available on the Internet, on some forums, websites, news websites, in newspapers, in magazines, and so on.
You know, I recently collected reviews of the book, you can see it on my website, and I posted about 100 reviews there, and many of these guys wrote to me on social networks, wrote to me on my Instagram and wrote to me in the comments on YouTube, I asked many people how the book affected their lives in general, and out of these 100-odd reviews, more than 50 people wrote to me that the book changed their lives, they read it at such a difficult time in their lives when they were at a crossroads, when some of them had already tried cybercrime, and more than 50 people wrote to me that the book helped them choose the right path in life. Most of them, by the way, became programmers after that, earn money completely legally, do not sit in prison, like me and many other cybercriminals. And only two people, while 50 changed their lives for the better, yes, only two wrote to me that after reading this book, they somehow got involved in cybercrime.
Let's run through the chapters.
Chapter 1 is called "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" and it has a very interesting epigraph, I took the words of Eugene Kaspersky, yes, you all know the creator of Kaspersky antivirus, here, and he writes "The most important criterion for any business is profitability, and cybercrime is no exception." Well, naturally, why many of us, from cybercriminals in general in the former CIS, why did we do this.
When Western journalists ask me to give some comments about Russian hackers, carders, I always tell them that I have never met a carder there or another cybercriminal from prosperous countries of Western Europe, I have not met cybercriminals from Norway, Sweden, Holland, I have not met from Switzerland, of course they exist, but they are mainly visitors from our countries, and, accordingly, I associate the fact that young people get into cybercrime, naturally, with the material condition of the family, the country in which we are. Therefore, of course, many of us got into cybercrime out of desperation, because there was no money in our families, but in principle, there are brains and many families got computers quite early, but we did not have support from the government, some startup incubators, centers for supporting talented youth, and so on.
We did the first thing we dug up on the Internet, that's what we did. Someone started creating some bulletin boards and went into business, but most of us ended up as cybercriminals. In the first chapter, I tell you how I first ended up under investigation, and accordingly, in a pretrial detention center, in a pretrial detention center. I also tell you under what circumstances we were detained.
So let's start with how we were detained. Look, we were at my girlfriend Katya's dacha. And, as it turns out, I was already being followed there from Minsk itself. We drove a hundred and something kilometers to this dacha. Well, the company was big. First of all, my brother was there, one of the main characters of this book. There was me, respectively, Katya. There was Ilya Saprykin, that is, he is my partner there in some areas.
Here. Well, and I just worked with this person. There was Sergey Starchuk, aka Fidel. There was also Kirill Kalashnikov, he is a very young carder, when we met he was only 18 or 18 years old, I did not know about it, maybe even less than 16, and all of us, in principle, before that celebrated the birthday of my carding forum dumps market, other guys came because the birthday was a few days before we got to the dacha, a very famous hacker Johnny Hell from Lithuania came.
There were girls, naturally, there were also night butterflies, so to speak, because the brigade there, guys, was large and somehow everyone needed to have fun. There were drugs, naturally, and alcohol. We celebrated, it turns out, the birthday of my forum Damsmarket, then went to the dacha. Well, a dacha, you understand, is a barbecue, girls cook food there, guys have fun there, we shoot at bottles there, heat up the sauna, that’s it.
Well, we had already thrown it in, it turns out, we were grilling shashlik in the fireplace, there was a slight storm, and then there was a knock on the door, a policeman came in, yes, a policeman in uniform, a Belarusian policeman, usually with a pistol in his hand, that is, not in a kaburin somewhere, and he said, what was that sound, were you shooting at something, but we said, listen, but we were shooting with, like, without air pistols, and well, there can't be any complaints from the neighbors, and so on, but when another person in uniform came in after this officer, probably 5-6 in civilian clothes, that is, I already realized that things were bad and they most likely came specifically for me, or for us. That's it. Our big mistake, of course, was that we took laptops with us, yes, that is, why did we drag them with us, and all the information is on the laptops, well, it is in encrypted form, but in any case, we shouldn't have taken laptops with us, especially since we were not going to work, but to rest.
I had some money with me, probably 20 or 30 thousand dollars. I was going to take it to my, let's say, stash, piggy bank, because my grandfather lived not far from the village where we had a dacha. I was going to take it to my grandfather the next day and throw it in there. I had a hookah box. Those of you who bought a hookah a long time ago might have seen that they were sold in such metal boxes.
I put my savings in there. I don't remember exactly how much was there at that time but I think 200 plus thousand dollars maybe from 200 to 300 and this money was there at the time when the police officers came in, as it turned out later, there were officers of the State Security Committee KGB with them in Belarus, it's still called that. Of course, I really regretted that we had our laptops with us with all the info and a whole bunch of money that they would just take away now, but by the way, there was a funny story about the money, my girl Katya, she somehow hid it somewhere, in short, the cops didn't get their hands on the money and in principle I don't remember how much, 28 thousand dollars or 25, what is it, in principle they came in handy later, so it turned out well in this regard, well, you know, when the cops come in, that is, well, you understand that the cops naturally you start wondering how they got out, who could have turned you in, why they came in the first place, what do they know first of all. They put handcuffs on me, by the way, on one of everyone present, and I realized that they came first of all, of course, for me. The guys from Odessa got cold feet, my brother's laptop was there, Fidel's, I think, and mine.
The guys got cold feet, they said they didn't know whose laptops they were, well, I kind of took them on myself, I think, and they started to conduct a light search of the house, but they can't conduct a search without the prosecutor's sanction, so they just asked for an inspection, to see what and who was in the other rooms. Well, like, besides how we were all hanging out in the hall by the fireplace, naturally, there was no one else in the house, they allowed me to eat there somehow, because, naturally, it is unknown when I would be able to do this next time.
Katya and I exchanged a few words there, I gave some valuable instructions there with my brother and accordingly, I even drank, I think, 50 grams and they took us to the nearest police station. I thought they would take us to Minsk, the capital, which was 100 kilometers from our dacha, but they took us to the nearest police station and there they started inspecting the cars. At that time, I had a Mercedes E-class, quite new, I had just bought it for 50 thousand dollars.
Ilya Saprykin was in his BMW, and Katya Mayana was in a Golfia. So, it turns out that they took us to the police station in these three cars. I could no longer drive my car, because I was handcuffed, and a KGB officer got behind the wheel of my car, as it turned out later. And there were funny moments when he didn’t know how to turn on the automatic transmission, yes, well, that’s what kind of officers they are. So they brought us to the police station building, and naturally they immediately inspected the cars.
That is, when the cops search your car, let's say, they naturally have to invite witnesses, but how is this done, that is, some homeless people from the nearest prison are taken as witnesses, that is, a couple of drunks are taken from a cage right in the police station, and they, as witnesses, sign their signatures that they were supposedly present during the search, that everything was legal, no one could have planted anything, in fact, it often happens that police officers act as witnesses, there are no, let's say, civilian witnesses, accordingly, some employee signs his signature.
Well, I didn't have anything in my car, Katya didn't either, but Soprykin, our friend and somewhere companion, had some used white plastic with him, that is, those credit cards on which the dumps were written, that is, information from the magnetic strip of someone else's stolen card and the PIN codes on it, and Soprykin, of course, is a fool, but he could have done it somehow, he knew that such a load was in her car, he could have dumped it somewhere along the road, yes, without attracting attention, and so he brought a whole pack of used white plastic to the police station.
They searched the cars, took fingerprints from everyone, including the girls, and when they take fingerprints, it's a very unpleasant procedure.
Firstly, it's not like abroad, like in Poland, yes, or in the US, when fingerprints are taken, you simply put one finger on a scanner like a POS terminal and everything is electronic. Here, how fingerprints are taken, they smear the entire hand with a roller like this, in short, with black printing ink, one hand, the other, and completely, and the palms, that is, well, almost up to the elbows, and this paint is also terribly difficult to wash off, that is, if you just wash your hands with water, you will never erase it, that is, you will rather erase the skin than this paint, but soap helps well, even cold water and soap, and it is perfectly washed off.
They took my fingerprints and took me to different rooms, where the police officers in Belarus, that's what they're still called, started not to beat me out, so to speak, but to persuade me to cooperate and admit my guilt, citing the fact that Soprykin has already testified against me here and there.
I say, bring me his testimony, show me there, well, nothing, as if naturally, there was another funny moment, the cops laid out on the table the money that I had in my pocket with me, well, there was for small expenses, I don't remember how much there was, maybe a thousand dollars, maybe a thousand and a half, they laid out those bills on the table, there were one hundred, fifty-dollar bills, and they took pictures of everything, that is, even then the thought flashed through my mind that, damn, the peasants had never seen so much money there, although the amount there was generally mere trifles.
After that, when we finished all these procedures, fingerprints, testimony at the local police station and inspection of the cars, of course, we were taken to Minsk, to the capital, that is, we drove there for a hundred and something kilometers, and it was already night, that is, we arrived in Minsk, probably, at about 5 in the morning. And what happens then, when, in principle, you are already detained.
We were taken to the police station, where I was introduced to the investigator, they said that he would be your investigator, would investigate the history of your adventures. But the investigator turned out to be more or less. And, there is another point, you can refuse to testify at all according to the Constitution, according to the law, or you can refuse to testify without a lawyer.
Naturally, I said that I needed a lawyer, but I didn't have one, because I was never going to prison, and the investigation told me, okay, we'll call a lawyer now, and they call a lawyer, some kind of duty lawyer, I can't say whether the duty lawyer there is good or bad, because any lawyer in the country, practically even the best one, is appointed duty lawyer once a month or once every six months, and he is obliged, roughly speaking, according to the schedule, or by law, to work there for a day for free, but maybe the state pays him something, but you don't pay him, he costs you free.
And this lawyer arrived, a woman, I still remember her last name, a Cossack, I ask her, listen, what should I do, in short. She tells me that well, you can kind of tell everything, the investigator there is good and almost added, we've been working with him for a long time, but naturally all this confused me, I think, what kind of nonsense and of course I didn't give any testimony.
But they didn't keep us in that police station for long, then they transferred us to some other room, I saw Fidel, I saw my brother. Katya and I were sitting next to each other on a chair, there was still an opportunity to talk quietly with her, I gave some instructions, she tried to remember everything, tried to remember in any case.
So we sat there for another two or three hours, after which I realized that they were finally detaining me, and all my friends and my brother, they remained free, and Katya, and they all came in, of course, I still remember my brother's sad look, he almost cried there when he realized that they were finally arresting me, they took me to the prosecutor. It was, if I'm not mistaken, Friday, and they took me to the prosecutor of the city of Minsk, a high enough position for him to decide whether to arrest me or not.
Well, naturally, when you are brought to the prosecutor, you are already essentially powerless there, and the chances are huge that you will be arrested, and your opinion, no matter what you tell him, what story, they no longer matter at all. They brought me to the prosecutor, he asked what you were doing there, didn't you steal anything there, well, naturally I said that I didn't know what was going on, naturally they arrested me, I think they give you arrest for two months from the start, after which they took you to the temporary detention center, if anyone doesn't know, a temporary detention center is a place where you sit according to the law for up to 10 days, either until charges are brought or if charges have already been brought, then you are taken to a pretrial detention center, a pretrial detention center, and you wait there for the preliminary investigation to be completed and, accordingly, for the further trial. They took me to the temporary detention center because they could have taken me to the pretrial detention center on Monday, for example, or something like that, but I just happened to be there on the weekend.
The temporary detention facility is a real hole, at least in Minsk at that time, that is, it is a facility at the district police department, at the district department of internal affairs, a small room with maybe five cells where they temporarily detain criminals, well, you can’t say that they are just suspected criminals, and they brought me to this temporary detention facility and put me in a cell in a cell, of course, we had not rare wooden tents and wooden scaffolds on a stake, something like a bed, only without a mattress, and you lie on them, on this tree, damn, for a day or two there, in short, and you think, damn, why the hell did I need all this.
When you steal something, it’s good when you don’t get caught. But like in my case, I was caught, and I’ll get a little ahead of myself and say that I had to serve a total of 10 years for it. Of course, I really didn’t like it all from the start of the temporary detention facility. That is, lying on these wooden beds, smoking like crazy, like it was my last time.
And thinking about the past, I guess. You can't make any plans for the future yet, but at least have some hopes, how to behave when the investigator comes, what to tell him. In the Air Force, of course, I had already heard from my friends who had previously encountered violations of the law.
I had, in principle, heard that you shouldn't talk to anyone, that there could be ears everywhere, tape recorders, bugs on the net, so-called prisoners or suspects who sit in the same cell with you specifically to eavesdrop, to get to something, to record everything or remember everything and then retell it to the investigator or most often to the detectives, that is, before the investigator. There was one guy in the cell with me, his name was Grisha, but naturally, according to the materials of my main case, I didn't talk to him.
By the way, I was accused of making counterfeit bank cards, Article 222 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus, and I was also accused of theft using computer equipment, this is a very serious article in Belarus, from six to fifteen, its sanction implied theft of money using other people's bank cards, and what we did, in fact, we bought goods in stores with other people's bank cards, we simply made clones, we wrote down a dump, that is, information from the magnetic strip of someone else's card to some of our own cards, to a discount card, or to some second-hand credit card, or whatever we managed to write down, that's what we wrote down, or we made a complete clone, that is, this is already a coincidence of all the numbers there, the last names for which you have documents, because in many stores, when buying for a large amount, they could ask for documents and it is highly desirable that the name on the card matches the name in your passport, for example, or in your license, for all these actions I was accused, so I understood that it was not good, because I am facing six to fifteen years. But it was not for nothing that I told you about this hen, yes, Grisha. You don’t know who he is, an ordinary guy or they are planting him there. But it is clear that the reasonable advice here is simply not to talk to anyone about the circumstances of your criminal case, not to comment, there, guilty, not guilty, did not do anything, admit guilt, do not admit guilt.
That’s it. And with this Grisha I behaved exactly like that, but my mistake was that he was supposedly being released, he was already leaving in the morning, and I still had to hang there for two days and the whole weekend, and he tells me in the morning that I am being released, if you want, write a note there, I will pass it on to your loved ones, to which I naturally refused because with a high degree of probability such a note will most likely end up on the investigator’s desk, but my mistake was that I still gave him Katya’s phone number, yes, and it will later play a certain role, I will tell you further, in our fate, a negative role.
Well, as they say, to be continued, see you!
Be sure to write your impressions in the comments, since "the first pancake is lumpy" and I will immediately respond and add/correct something in the following topics.
Enjoy reading!
Friends, hello!
During the period when I was a cybercriminal, I had a Mercedes E-class at that time, quite new, I had just bought it for 50-something thousand dollars. They put handcuffs on me, by the way, on one of all those present, and I understood that they came first of all, of course, for me. They searched the cars, took fingerprints from everyone, including the girls. I was accused of all these actions, and I understood that it was not enough, you asked me many times to tell about myself, who I am, what I am, what I do and so on. All these questions will be covered during a separate interview. A special person will come, a strong interviewer, a very girl, to my channel and we will answer all this about what I am doing now, there are many projects of mine, you basically know and I want to inform you that starting this week, there will always be not 2 but 3 releases on our channel, that is, we will now have a new release on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, that is, every two days you will see a new release on the channel, 2 will be with invited guests, and in one release I will tell you a little about my life before the moment you know me, what I did in the past. That's it. Therefore, please, I ask for your assistance, that is, watch carefully, write what was missing in the release, in which direction we should move, ask some questions.
That's it. Well, any feedback is important so that I understand that I don't need this alone, but we need it together. That's it. And I understood what can be improved and how we can make our releases and stories all about my book and in general about Russian cybercrime in general more interesting. But today I have a T-shirt that says Think about your past, and we will talk about who I was before and what I did.
And many of you know this book of mine, How I Stole a Million, from the story of the Repentant Carder, and this book probably covers more than a 10-year period of my life, the period when I was a cybercriminal who had achieved a certain success, that is, it is not for me to judge, because no matter what I say, you will say, you are a loser, and others will say, oh, you have achieved something. Therefore, if you are interested, listen and read. And it is with this issue that I want to begin a series of topics on my book, that is, we will go step by step through the chapters.
I will tell you 2-3 times more information than is presented on its pages, because there are some things I could not tell about at the time when I was writing the book. There are some things I could not tell because the volume of the printed edition is limited, and I simply did not have the physical ability to tell everything. And it seems to me that it is with this issue that we will begin, so to speak, the history of Russian cybercrime in general.
There will be about thirty issues, so don't switch over, recommend it to your friends, I think it will be interesting. Let's start with the preface. And I will say right away that the preface is the only thing in this book that I did not write, because at that time I was in prison, you see, serving a 10-year sentence in one of the Belarusian penal colonies, and at that time I was no writer, well, and we agreed with one of my girl friends that she, in principle, I would give her raw materials, drafts, and she would express them in some kind of artistic form. But then she got pregnant, she had other problems and concerns, and I had to write everything, having no experience in this, but 98% of the positive reviews speak for themselves and I hope that you liked it. I will sit for 10 years.
My beautiful wife will most likely leave me. My beloved grandfather, who raised me, will die without ever seeing me free. My mother will grow old, more from grief than from age. For my friends, I will become a ghost, with whom there is nothing to talk and with whom it is somehow awkward to share the joy of the birth of a child or impressions of a trip. I myself will change. I will become a psycho, with yellow skin and bad teeth. A moral monster, nervous, angry and cruel. My life can no longer be saved or changed.
But your destiny may be different. Why did I write this book at all? There were several reasons for that. Yes, one of them was that I wanted to gain some fame through the book, because I was really going to ask for a pardon from the President of the Republic of Belarus, which I, of course, later asked for, but it was ignored there, but I wrote it more for another reason, you see, that is, the book for me was like a diary, and when you end up behind bars, you have, well, there, especially if there is a girl waiting for you there and a bunch of other worries, naturally, you go a little crazy, you can say so, and the book was like a breath of fresh air for me, that is, I started a diary, I remembered some funny moments in the past, which happened quite recently. Your thoughts were carried away there, away from these gray walls, from these everyday troubles, often idiotic guards.
And, of course, for me it was an outlet. And then I looked, it seemed to be working out well, there was something to remember, there was even something to talk about, and accordingly I decided to add some more professional moments there, and this book came out. When I was writing it, I had, of course, a moral dilemma about whether it would be a guide to cybercrime, but I reassured myself that the information presented in it would be outdated by the time the book was published, that is, it would no longer be possible to commit the theft that my team and I constantly committed. Then I considered that everything that was presented in it was publicly available on the Internet, on some forums, websites, news websites, in newspapers, in magazines, and so on.
You know, I recently collected reviews of the book, you can see it on my website, and I posted about 100 reviews there, and many of these guys wrote to me on social networks, wrote to me on my Instagram and wrote to me in the comments on YouTube, I asked many people how the book affected their lives in general, and out of these 100-odd reviews, more than 50 people wrote to me that the book changed their lives, they read it at such a difficult time in their lives when they were at a crossroads, when some of them had already tried cybercrime, and more than 50 people wrote to me that the book helped them choose the right path in life. Most of them, by the way, became programmers after that, earn money completely legally, do not sit in prison, like me and many other cybercriminals. And only two people, while 50 changed their lives for the better, yes, only two wrote to me that after reading this book, they somehow got involved in cybercrime.
Let's run through the chapters.
Chapter 1 is called "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" and it has a very interesting epigraph, I took the words of Eugene Kaspersky, yes, you all know the creator of Kaspersky antivirus, here, and he writes "The most important criterion for any business is profitability, and cybercrime is no exception." Well, naturally, why many of us, from cybercriminals in general in the former CIS, why did we do this.
When Western journalists ask me to give some comments about Russian hackers, carders, I always tell them that I have never met a carder there or another cybercriminal from prosperous countries of Western Europe, I have not met cybercriminals from Norway, Sweden, Holland, I have not met from Switzerland, of course they exist, but they are mainly visitors from our countries, and, accordingly, I associate the fact that young people get into cybercrime, naturally, with the material condition of the family, the country in which we are. Therefore, of course, many of us got into cybercrime out of desperation, because there was no money in our families, but in principle, there are brains and many families got computers quite early, but we did not have support from the government, some startup incubators, centers for supporting talented youth, and so on.
We did the first thing we dug up on the Internet, that's what we did. Someone started creating some bulletin boards and went into business, but most of us ended up as cybercriminals. In the first chapter, I tell you how I first ended up under investigation, and accordingly, in a pretrial detention center, in a pretrial detention center. I also tell you under what circumstances we were detained.
So let's start with how we were detained. Look, we were at my girlfriend Katya's dacha. And, as it turns out, I was already being followed there from Minsk itself. We drove a hundred and something kilometers to this dacha. Well, the company was big. First of all, my brother was there, one of the main characters of this book. There was me, respectively, Katya. There was Ilya Saprykin, that is, he is my partner there in some areas.
Here. Well, and I just worked with this person. There was Sergey Starchuk, aka Fidel. There was also Kirill Kalashnikov, he is a very young carder, when we met he was only 18 or 18 years old, I did not know about it, maybe even less than 16, and all of us, in principle, before that celebrated the birthday of my carding forum dumps market, other guys came because the birthday was a few days before we got to the dacha, a very famous hacker Johnny Hell from Lithuania came.
There were girls, naturally, there were also night butterflies, so to speak, because the brigade there, guys, was large and somehow everyone needed to have fun. There were drugs, naturally, and alcohol. We celebrated, it turns out, the birthday of my forum Damsmarket, then went to the dacha. Well, a dacha, you understand, is a barbecue, girls cook food there, guys have fun there, we shoot at bottles there, heat up the sauna, that’s it.
Well, we had already thrown it in, it turns out, we were grilling shashlik in the fireplace, there was a slight storm, and then there was a knock on the door, a policeman came in, yes, a policeman in uniform, a Belarusian policeman, usually with a pistol in his hand, that is, not in a kaburin somewhere, and he said, what was that sound, were you shooting at something, but we said, listen, but we were shooting with, like, without air pistols, and well, there can't be any complaints from the neighbors, and so on, but when another person in uniform came in after this officer, probably 5-6 in civilian clothes, that is, I already realized that things were bad and they most likely came specifically for me, or for us. That's it. Our big mistake, of course, was that we took laptops with us, yes, that is, why did we drag them with us, and all the information is on the laptops, well, it is in encrypted form, but in any case, we shouldn't have taken laptops with us, especially since we were not going to work, but to rest.
I had some money with me, probably 20 or 30 thousand dollars. I was going to take it to my, let's say, stash, piggy bank, because my grandfather lived not far from the village where we had a dacha. I was going to take it to my grandfather the next day and throw it in there. I had a hookah box. Those of you who bought a hookah a long time ago might have seen that they were sold in such metal boxes.
I put my savings in there. I don't remember exactly how much was there at that time but I think 200 plus thousand dollars maybe from 200 to 300 and this money was there at the time when the police officers came in, as it turned out later, there were officers of the State Security Committee KGB with them in Belarus, it's still called that. Of course, I really regretted that we had our laptops with us with all the info and a whole bunch of money that they would just take away now, but by the way, there was a funny story about the money, my girl Katya, she somehow hid it somewhere, in short, the cops didn't get their hands on the money and in principle I don't remember how much, 28 thousand dollars or 25, what is it, in principle they came in handy later, so it turned out well in this regard, well, you know, when the cops come in, that is, well, you understand that the cops naturally you start wondering how they got out, who could have turned you in, why they came in the first place, what do they know first of all. They put handcuffs on me, by the way, on one of everyone present, and I realized that they came first of all, of course, for me. The guys from Odessa got cold feet, my brother's laptop was there, Fidel's, I think, and mine.
The guys got cold feet, they said they didn't know whose laptops they were, well, I kind of took them on myself, I think, and they started to conduct a light search of the house, but they can't conduct a search without the prosecutor's sanction, so they just asked for an inspection, to see what and who was in the other rooms. Well, like, besides how we were all hanging out in the hall by the fireplace, naturally, there was no one else in the house, they allowed me to eat there somehow, because, naturally, it is unknown when I would be able to do this next time.
Katya and I exchanged a few words there, I gave some valuable instructions there with my brother and accordingly, I even drank, I think, 50 grams and they took us to the nearest police station. I thought they would take us to Minsk, the capital, which was 100 kilometers from our dacha, but they took us to the nearest police station and there they started inspecting the cars. At that time, I had a Mercedes E-class, quite new, I had just bought it for 50 thousand dollars.
Ilya Saprykin was in his BMW, and Katya Mayana was in a Golfia. So, it turns out that they took us to the police station in these three cars. I could no longer drive my car, because I was handcuffed, and a KGB officer got behind the wheel of my car, as it turned out later. And there were funny moments when he didn’t know how to turn on the automatic transmission, yes, well, that’s what kind of officers they are. So they brought us to the police station building, and naturally they immediately inspected the cars.
That is, when the cops search your car, let's say, they naturally have to invite witnesses, but how is this done, that is, some homeless people from the nearest prison are taken as witnesses, that is, a couple of drunks are taken from a cage right in the police station, and they, as witnesses, sign their signatures that they were supposedly present during the search, that everything was legal, no one could have planted anything, in fact, it often happens that police officers act as witnesses, there are no, let's say, civilian witnesses, accordingly, some employee signs his signature.
Well, I didn't have anything in my car, Katya didn't either, but Soprykin, our friend and somewhere companion, had some used white plastic with him, that is, those credit cards on which the dumps were written, that is, information from the magnetic strip of someone else's stolen card and the PIN codes on it, and Soprykin, of course, is a fool, but he could have done it somehow, he knew that such a load was in her car, he could have dumped it somewhere along the road, yes, without attracting attention, and so he brought a whole pack of used white plastic to the police station.
They searched the cars, took fingerprints from everyone, including the girls, and when they take fingerprints, it's a very unpleasant procedure.
Firstly, it's not like abroad, like in Poland, yes, or in the US, when fingerprints are taken, you simply put one finger on a scanner like a POS terminal and everything is electronic. Here, how fingerprints are taken, they smear the entire hand with a roller like this, in short, with black printing ink, one hand, the other, and completely, and the palms, that is, well, almost up to the elbows, and this paint is also terribly difficult to wash off, that is, if you just wash your hands with water, you will never erase it, that is, you will rather erase the skin than this paint, but soap helps well, even cold water and soap, and it is perfectly washed off.
They took my fingerprints and took me to different rooms, where the police officers in Belarus, that's what they're still called, started not to beat me out, so to speak, but to persuade me to cooperate and admit my guilt, citing the fact that Soprykin has already testified against me here and there.
I say, bring me his testimony, show me there, well, nothing, as if naturally, there was another funny moment, the cops laid out on the table the money that I had in my pocket with me, well, there was for small expenses, I don't remember how much there was, maybe a thousand dollars, maybe a thousand and a half, they laid out those bills on the table, there were one hundred, fifty-dollar bills, and they took pictures of everything, that is, even then the thought flashed through my mind that, damn, the peasants had never seen so much money there, although the amount there was generally mere trifles.
After that, when we finished all these procedures, fingerprints, testimony at the local police station and inspection of the cars, of course, we were taken to Minsk, to the capital, that is, we drove there for a hundred and something kilometers, and it was already night, that is, we arrived in Minsk, probably, at about 5 in the morning. And what happens then, when, in principle, you are already detained.
We were taken to the police station, where I was introduced to the investigator, they said that he would be your investigator, would investigate the history of your adventures. But the investigator turned out to be more or less. And, there is another point, you can refuse to testify at all according to the Constitution, according to the law, or you can refuse to testify without a lawyer.
Naturally, I said that I needed a lawyer, but I didn't have one, because I was never going to prison, and the investigation told me, okay, we'll call a lawyer now, and they call a lawyer, some kind of duty lawyer, I can't say whether the duty lawyer there is good or bad, because any lawyer in the country, practically even the best one, is appointed duty lawyer once a month or once every six months, and he is obliged, roughly speaking, according to the schedule, or by law, to work there for a day for free, but maybe the state pays him something, but you don't pay him, he costs you free.
And this lawyer arrived, a woman, I still remember her last name, a Cossack, I ask her, listen, what should I do, in short. She tells me that well, you can kind of tell everything, the investigator there is good and almost added, we've been working with him for a long time, but naturally all this confused me, I think, what kind of nonsense and of course I didn't give any testimony.
But they didn't keep us in that police station for long, then they transferred us to some other room, I saw Fidel, I saw my brother. Katya and I were sitting next to each other on a chair, there was still an opportunity to talk quietly with her, I gave some instructions, she tried to remember everything, tried to remember in any case.
So we sat there for another two or three hours, after which I realized that they were finally detaining me, and all my friends and my brother, they remained free, and Katya, and they all came in, of course, I still remember my brother's sad look, he almost cried there when he realized that they were finally arresting me, they took me to the prosecutor. It was, if I'm not mistaken, Friday, and they took me to the prosecutor of the city of Minsk, a high enough position for him to decide whether to arrest me or not.
Well, naturally, when you are brought to the prosecutor, you are already essentially powerless there, and the chances are huge that you will be arrested, and your opinion, no matter what you tell him, what story, they no longer matter at all. They brought me to the prosecutor, he asked what you were doing there, didn't you steal anything there, well, naturally I said that I didn't know what was going on, naturally they arrested me, I think they give you arrest for two months from the start, after which they took you to the temporary detention center, if anyone doesn't know, a temporary detention center is a place where you sit according to the law for up to 10 days, either until charges are brought or if charges have already been brought, then you are taken to a pretrial detention center, a pretrial detention center, and you wait there for the preliminary investigation to be completed and, accordingly, for the further trial. They took me to the temporary detention center because they could have taken me to the pretrial detention center on Monday, for example, or something like that, but I just happened to be there on the weekend.
The temporary detention facility is a real hole, at least in Minsk at that time, that is, it is a facility at the district police department, at the district department of internal affairs, a small room with maybe five cells where they temporarily detain criminals, well, you can’t say that they are just suspected criminals, and they brought me to this temporary detention facility and put me in a cell in a cell, of course, we had not rare wooden tents and wooden scaffolds on a stake, something like a bed, only without a mattress, and you lie on them, on this tree, damn, for a day or two there, in short, and you think, damn, why the hell did I need all this.
When you steal something, it’s good when you don’t get caught. But like in my case, I was caught, and I’ll get a little ahead of myself and say that I had to serve a total of 10 years for it. Of course, I really didn’t like it all from the start of the temporary detention facility. That is, lying on these wooden beds, smoking like crazy, like it was my last time.
And thinking about the past, I guess. You can't make any plans for the future yet, but at least have some hopes, how to behave when the investigator comes, what to tell him. In the Air Force, of course, I had already heard from my friends who had previously encountered violations of the law.
I had, in principle, heard that you shouldn't talk to anyone, that there could be ears everywhere, tape recorders, bugs on the net, so-called prisoners or suspects who sit in the same cell with you specifically to eavesdrop, to get to something, to record everything or remember everything and then retell it to the investigator or most often to the detectives, that is, before the investigator. There was one guy in the cell with me, his name was Grisha, but naturally, according to the materials of my main case, I didn't talk to him.
By the way, I was accused of making counterfeit bank cards, Article 222 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus, and I was also accused of theft using computer equipment, this is a very serious article in Belarus, from six to fifteen, its sanction implied theft of money using other people's bank cards, and what we did, in fact, we bought goods in stores with other people's bank cards, we simply made clones, we wrote down a dump, that is, information from the magnetic strip of someone else's card to some of our own cards, to a discount card, or to some second-hand credit card, or whatever we managed to write down, that's what we wrote down, or we made a complete clone, that is, this is already a coincidence of all the numbers there, the last names for which you have documents, because in many stores, when buying for a large amount, they could ask for documents and it is highly desirable that the name on the card matches the name in your passport, for example, or in your license, for all these actions I was accused, so I understood that it was not good, because I am facing six to fifteen years. But it was not for nothing that I told you about this hen, yes, Grisha. You don’t know who he is, an ordinary guy or they are planting him there. But it is clear that the reasonable advice here is simply not to talk to anyone about the circumstances of your criminal case, not to comment, there, guilty, not guilty, did not do anything, admit guilt, do not admit guilt.
That’s it. And with this Grisha I behaved exactly like that, but my mistake was that he was supposedly being released, he was already leaving in the morning, and I still had to hang there for two days and the whole weekend, and he tells me in the morning that I am being released, if you want, write a note there, I will pass it on to your loved ones, to which I naturally refused because with a high degree of probability such a note will most likely end up on the investigator’s desk, but my mistake was that I still gave him Katya’s phone number, yes, and it will later play a certain role, I will tell you further, in our fate, a negative role.
Well, as they say, to be continued, see you!
Last edited:
