If you think the richest people are the happiest and can buy everything, then just read this story to the end. Freedom, health and happiness can not always be acquired for money, no matter how you can buy real friends and not return your loved ones. In pursuit of money, we often forget about simple things and lose the main thing. Buddhists say that we die every minute, and our life consists of millions of choices. What you choose - decide for yourself.
This story is about how one very lucky, but very unhappy person was able to make many wrong choices, on which his fate depended.
Marrakesh
In the early morning of April 28, 2011, the Jama'a el-Fna square in the center of Marrakech was swarming with people. In this traditional eastern chaos between cars, stalls, luxury hotels and street eateries, local passers-by and tourists scurried about, among whom was Roma Seleznyov - a stout boy with a large mole on his cheek, an overgrown and slightly swollen face after yesterday's adventures. Persistent fumes and the absence of a jacket also hinted at a cheerful night. In this connection, Roman and his wife were denied breakfast, they were not even allowed to enter the restaurant at the hotel where they lived. I had to look for another place. They went out to the square and rushed to the nearest decent eatery, located directly opposite the hotel, there was no strength to go further - the "bins" were burning, and Roman wanted a hangover much more than Benedict's eggs for breakfast. But for some reason, they were not welcome here either: the waiter replied that he would serve them not earlier than in half an hour. The novel continued to blame the tracksuit and yesterday's fumes for everything, stubbornly said: "We're stay". To which the Moroccan mysteriously replied: "Bad idea".
An explosion thundered 10 minutes later ... It was a terrorist attack. Nobody understood anything. Seconds of silence after the rolling rumble. And then chaos and panic. Dust, stones, debris and blood.
After some time, Roma came to his senses for a short time. As it turned out later, the terrorists left two briefcases with explosives in this cafe and blew them up with a mobile phone. 17 people were killed. Moroccan authorities blamed al-Qaeda for the attack, but the organization never claimed responsibility for it.
His wife barely suffered, but Seleznev fell into a coma, despite the fact that his father, a State Duma deputy from the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, evacuated his son on a special medical flight. But our officials will not be alive only with medicine, the caring dad called the priest to his son, who baptized Roman while he was unconscious. Despite all these efforts, the doctors' predictions were disappointing. According to them, Seleznev had every chance to die or, at best, remain a “vegetable” until the end of his days. After such events, the wife packed her things and flew to Vladivostok. She took the money there and emigrated for permanent residence in the United States. While he was in a coma, he received a letter from King Mohammed VI of Morocco: “The people of Morocco were deeply shocked and saddened to learn that you were hurt,” the letter said.
But despite the bad predictions, Seleznev's inner stubbornness, with God's help, prevailed. And after just two weeks, Roma came out of a coma. It took him about a year to recover, and after numerous surgeries, a titanium plate replaced part of his skull.
But this incident is not the most surprising turn of his biography. Rather, it is a coincidence or one of those choices that we make every day, every minute. Maybe sometimes you need to look more closely at the signs? Especially when they tell you: "Bad idea" ...
nCux from Vladivostok
Seleznev was born in Vladivostok on July 23, 1984. Parents soon divorced. Little Roma stayed with his mother in a communal apartment with an area of 10 square meters. Later, she bought an apartment from her brother, where the small family of two moved. Mother worked as a cashier in one of the district stores and often drank. Roma spent most of his childhood either alone or under the supervision of his grandmother. In the harsh life of Vladivostok in the 2000s, Psycho, as his friends called him for his stubborn and explosive nature, tried everything from glue to alcohol.
In 2000, Roma returned home to find that his mother had drowned in the bathtub. On the same day, her brother came to the apartment, took all the valuables and ordered sixteen-year-old Seleznev to vacate the living space. The teenager went to live with his grandmother and got a job in a computer club, where he received 200 rubles a day. Later in his letter to the US government , Roma will write that his grandmother was his only real parent and loved one.
Agree, it's hard to imagine that this particular guy will earn (steal) his first million in a few years.
But in order for this to happen, Roma had to make a lot of efforts and despite all the hardships, perseverance prevailed. He soon went to college, making progress in mathematics, computer science, and was even able to learn rudimentary English. Probably, for the desire to survive and perseverance, the children's idols of the Psycho were Ninja Turtles. And pizza at that time was a delicacy for an ordinary guy from Vladivostok.
In the computer club where Seleznev worked had an Internet connection, and on the home computer for which he saved up, eating Rollton for months, there was a connection to Fido. The guy was keenly interested not only in the Internet, but also in ways to make money in it. And on the carderplanet and carder.org forums, he very quickly found his own kind and rewrote his street name in a hacker manner. And over time, the long nCux in maHke turned into a laconic nCux.
Roma met on the forums and his first accomplice with the awkward nickname Eadle. Either "eagle" or "slowed down", one of the first traded in mass scanning of RDP servers for the presence of simple or standard passwords. It should be noted that at that time, both Windows 2000 and Windows Server left the password for the administrator account by default empty and in order to change it, additional steps were required. All Eadl had to do was write an RDP scanner. At that time, not very many people guessed before, and the catch was so rich that it was not possible to handle everything manually. Most often, a keylogger was simply installed on infected machines.
Once, on one of the infected computers, Eadle discovered an account for the American system Accurint, owned by the LexisNexis corporation. The system was intended for US internal affairs officials and lawyers in order to obtain information about US citizens. nCux quickly realized that such infa could "enter" not only policemen, but also carders. After all, credit card numbers, enriched with information, were already worth much more money. Such a kit could contain almost everything that could be found on a person, from his social number, printout and ending with his mother's maiden name. So it was possible to gain access to the bank account and understand exactly what budget the victim has. Soon nCux reached an agreement with Eadlo and, having made a deposit to the forum fund, became the official carderplanet punch driver.
In addition to various records, there were also credit cards, which were also enriched with data from AccurInt and were sold as "fullz" from the English "full info". Time passed and Seleznev, having earned a reputation as a respectable seller, began to earn decent money on his schemes. Now he was able to rent himself a decent apartment near the center of Vladivostok and even buy an old "right-handed" Toyota Mark II. But I wanted more ... And BadB was already looming on the horizon.
Vladislav Khorokhorin, at that time already expelled from carderplanet, established himself as a boor and did not always keep his word. But thanks to non-trivial solutions for finding credit cards in hacked processors, he did business to the fullest. After Script, it was the most famous seller of stolen data. Roma decided to turn to him. How to automate the process of searching for credit cards, but the main thing is how to find "dumps", information from credit card tracks.
Khorokhorin wrote a simple program that looked for information not only on the local computer, but also searched neighboring network resources for credit cards and "dumps". The result was not long in coming: the leaked dump database contained no more than 10,000 rooms, but they all belonged to the clients of a luxury Swiss hotel. Even the most common cards from this base easily allowed you to make purchases for several thousand dollars. The average price of a dump at that time was $ 50. The math was simple: 10,000 x $ 50 = $ 500,000, maybe a little less. For the first part of the database from BadB, nCux received only $ 60,000. Further, having grasped the essence of the issue, Roma realized how greedy Khorokhorin was. And he offered to divide the profit in half. Dumps from this base had the effect of an atomic bomb: everything worked for thousands of dollars without fail, “america” in “europe”, “europe” in “america”. Some cards “passed” hundreds of thousands of euros and broke all records. In addition, BadB envisioned a way to use chip cards, which were just starting to appear in Europe, even in terminals that required a chip. The smart card was simply burned with high voltage and the terminals allowed the switch to use a magnetic stripe.
But Roma did not work alone, there was also Eadle with whom he had to share and Seleznev did it honestly. Demands also grew. The dvushka on Vtoraya Rechka was already quite cramped, the Japanese car was slow.
Roman Seleznev with his wife Svetlana, who moved to the USA for permanent residence.
And there were also friends. Those very friends who supported Roma in the most difficult moments of his life. The very ones who, as a brotherhood of Ninja Turtles, stood up for his protection in school and college, the very ones with whom he spent his childhood. The very ones who could not go to university and tried to find at least some kind of work. Yes, the very ones that Roma had completely forgotten. And now I had to remember them.
Big bucks
nCux decided, "Fuck that fat cuntball." And he stopped working with BadB. Why is Khorokhorin needed if he has his own people to take care of?
Seleznev launched his own service with 24/7 support. The guys rented an apartment in the center and were on duty at ICQ in shifts. No one provided a service of this level at that time.
Many people put up with BadB only because there was no alternative. But with the advent of the polite and good-natured "online ninja", many carders immediately went over to them. Moreover, the service worked 24/7.
Once the doorbell rang at the door of a rented apartment: "Open the plumber, you drown the neighbors." The one who was then "on duty" opened the door, but immediately regretted it, having received a blow in the face. Three masked men burst into the apartment with rifles and shouting: “Fuck on the floor! I overdo it! " The robbers not only took the cash register, but also sent one of Seleznev's employees to bring the money that was at the carders' house, continuing to hold the rest of them hostage. As it turned out later, the friends of Roma's ex-girlfriend were behind the robbery, who thus decided to get compensation when parting. After the incident with the robbery, the guys moved under the reliable surveillance of video cameras to the Hyundai hotel. It was there, in the city center, that they rented a luxurious office.
They no longer worked with BadB, but continued to communicate. Sometimes in order to get this or that information, and sometimes just to eliminate competition: the guys drank and played with Khorokhorin in three shifts. Thus, BadB was in a coma, and his website was idle while one of the guys was always online. It also came to quite eccentric cases with pogroms of presidential suites and drunken losses of $ 60,000 in a Forex club. In some century, the loner BadB counted on friendship, and Seleznev and the company just made money. Ce la vie.
Models of everything, including software for sorting map databases, were copied from Khorokhorin. The drunken suggestions of BadB, which he could not remember in the morning, became reality for the guys. So, during one such karder sabantuy, BadB proposed to develop complex software that would be loaded through vulnerabilities in the browser, would itself find cards in the attacked networks and could infect computers neighboring on the network. But Seleznev did not reach for the difficult. An ordinary .bat file was written, which, using the net map command, identified computers on the network and searched for the contents of computers using standard windows tools, all this was turned into an executable file using the bat2exe utility. The most amazing thing is that even this solution worked. For every 10,000 "downloads", that is, infections, one database was detected.
nCux quickly realized that POS terminals were the most delicious targets. None of his team had the slightest clue about programming, so the coders were hired, and the ideas were boldly borrowed from BadB. Eadle also continued to work, guessing simple passwords for VNC and RDP payment terminals. Later, more complex software was developed that not only searched for plain text, but could also intercept traffic or information exchange between the reader and the host. Using vulnerabilities in the browser, Seleznev purchased "downloads", infected systems and copied all operations on cards in automatic mode. The scheme worked. By 2009, Seleznev had become one of the most successful merchants of stolen cards in the world. Even on the closed carder forums, Roma was a respected person, despite the fact that he had neither hacking skills nor programming.
Most often, his targets were small eateries in Washington and other cities in the United States. In the materials of the criminal case, several pizzerias, street foods with burritos, bakeries are mentioned (a total of about 3,700 enterprises over the years). Seleznev chose small business because of poor security: such enterprises do not have their own cyber defense departments and usually use bad passwords.
At that time, the discussion of "unlimited" cashouts was just beginning on closed forums. The essence of the attack was that the processing of the institution that issued the card was hacked. Limits were removed on these cards, the cards themselves were transferred to "drops", who went to ATMs and withdraw money until the operators of payment systems noticed something was wrong and did not turn off the processing entirely. Methods of attacking HSM in order to extract PIN codes were also discussed.
“Unlimited cash out” happened frequently. Very quickly, the faces of the guys became familiar near the ATMs of Vladivostok and they had to travel to other cities to cash out. To Moscow. Or even to Khabarovsk.
Several successful methods of attacking HSM have been developed in the carder community. Even if the attacks failed, it was always possible to find the right person in the right country, carders were everywhere. Neither Seleznev nor his team had the slightest idea of how to carry out such attacks. But why? Hacking virtuosos such as the Drinkman brothers, Scorpo and M1cron have been "smitten". Or Pleshuk and Tsurikov, Gucci and Liqud. Seleznev and the team were content with the role of cashiers. They also handed out cash cards to trusted customers. Incomes were skyrocketing and the guys had to buy a calculating machine, rereading cash by hand took a lot of time, which they had already learned how to spend effectively.
Cybernetics, Automation, Bulba and Rebranding
But BadB did not sit idly by either. The idea of creating an automatic store of stolen credit cards has been in the minds of carders for a long time. But no one believed that such a store would "withstand" the onslaught of special services and rival carders. Nevertheless, BadB made the dream come true. In early 2008, Khorokhorin presented the first fully automatic store of stolen credit cards.
It looked almost like Amazon: you could search by category, choosing between card brands or different financial institutions. The US authorities believe that Khorokhorin "re-flashed" the carder market: previously, stolen cards appeared on separate forum branches, now the process of exchanging stolen data has been optimized and automated.
In the first version of the store, account replenishment was carried out using Webmoney, Liberty Reserve and in a semi-automatic mode through the Western Union system. Khorokhorin approached the matter with all seriousness and used such emerging technologies as browser fingerprinting and super cookies in the store. Sellers placed cards and controlled sales in a fully automatic mode. Most of the carders appreciated the convenience and began to actively use the service.
The glory of BadB haunted nCux, and despite the fact that Khorokhorin repeatedly offered to resume cooperation, Seleznev went the other way. After destroying his former pseudonym, Roman secretly hired a programmer who developed an automatic store similar to the BadB service.
BadB's monopoly did not last long, in 2009 Sleznev opened a similar service under new nicknames - Track2 and Bulba. BadB reacted to the incident with indignation, especially when Seleznev's new platform completely bought ads on the main carding platform of that time - the carder.su forum.
Roma bribed the administration of the forum and completely took away the rights to advertise the sale of credit card dumps. Horokhorin's indignation knew no bounds. A powerful ddos attack followed immediately, knocking out the new track2 service. Powerful ddos and death threats haunted the service.
BadB had no idea that his new competitor was one of the few people he considered his friend. A Ukrainian with Jewish roots did not really know how to make friends, but did not lose hope. The bacchanalia only ended when Roma accidentally ended up on the same hosting site that hosted BadB. Thus, attacking Seleznev's service, BadB each time actually cut the branch on which it sits. It was also impossible to bribe the hosting admin who was profitable from such competition. The "platform war" lasted until the arrest of BadB in August 2010, after which Seleznev actually remained a monopolist.
But he managed to reach the level of Khorokhorin much later, when after the terrorist attack Roma again changed his nickname to 2pac, and the site was called 2pack.cc. He positioned his resource as a platform for the best sellers of stolen data in the world, promised round-the-clock customer support and daily updates of the range of bank cards. Seleznev not only sold goods from his own sources, he was approached by hackers from all over the world who hacked Home Depot Neiman and Marcus Target. In turn, Seleznev honestly shared and gave the best prices for their goods.
Run, Roma, run!
This is how this chapter should begin. Sentiment aside, the US Department of State Security (USSS) has been monitoring the activities of Seleznev and his accomplices since 2002. On May 19, 2009, after the arrest in Estonia of Sergei Tsurikov, the first arrested of the participants in the RBS WorldPay hack, agents of the FBI and the US Security Service met with representatives of the FSB in Moscow. The subject of the conversation was the residents of the Russian Federation who participated in the hacking and cashing of RBS, but did not travel abroad. During the exchange of information, US intelligence agents provided evidence that a Vladivostok resident Roman Seleznev was hiding behind the nickname nCux, who cashed out about a million US dollars himself and through his "drops" during the attack on RBS, sharing the income with the organizers of the attack.
Excerpt from the document, which says that Seleznev received information from the FSB.
It is curious that Evgeny Anikin and Viktor Pleschuk, citizens of the Russian Federation, who were directly behind the RBS hack, "got off" with a suspended sentence in 2010-2011. Although Anikin spent a year in a pre-trial detention center on the territory of the Russian Federation. A resident of Moldova, Oleg Kovelin, also mentioned in the US indictment on RBS, who initially gained access to the internal network of the financial institution, was detained in 2016 during an international operation against the Cobalt / Carbanak group.
A month after the meeting of the American special services and the FSB, in June 2009, nCux announced on one of the carder forums that he was leaving the business, after which his profiles on the forums were blocked. Interestingly, the US criminal case indicates that it was the FSB who whispered information to Seleznev that the American authorities were interested in him. As follows from the records of the investigation, the correspondence of the carder confirms his connection with the FSB. For example, Seleznev wrote about this to Horokhorin and claimed that he had a roof from the Russian special services. Most likely there was no protection. But there was a father with serious connections, who recently appeared in the life of his son.
There is an island of bad luck in the ocean ...
Seleznev earned quite well. Only through one of the services for transferring money, he cashed out about $ 18 million. His exact earnings are unknown, but he is estimated at tens of millions of dollars: the carder received money through bitcoins, WebMoney and other electronic wallets. He regularly took money from Moscow to Vladivostok in bags, bought two houses in Bali, flew by plane to islands in the Indian Ocean. He often photographed wads of money and expensive cars.
Realizing that he could be tracked by the US special services, Seleznev traveled carefully. He chose countries that do not have an extradition treaty with the United States and bought tickets only at the last moment, preventing the special services from tracking their movements.
In July 2014, he went to the Maldives, where he rented a villa for $ 1,400 a day. “I took the most expensive villa for myself, I have my own servants,” he wrote to one of the accomplices.
Upon learning that Seleznev was in the Maldives, the US Security Council agents asked the US State Department to use their connections with local authorities. After negotiations, the head of the country's police agreed to detain the hacker, despite the absence of an extradition treaty. Then three US special agents flew to the Maldives. Together with the police, they tracked Seleznev's movements. When he went to the airport, from where he was supposed to fly to Moscow, he was detained. Carder was pushed into a private jet and brought to an American military base in Guam 12 hours later.
According to the criminal case, Seleznev had a laptop with 1.7 million stolen credit card numbers, as well as passwords to access servers, email accounts and financial transfers. The laptop password was plain "Ochko123". There was no encryption at all. Then, involuntarily, you will remember the song of the Circle that it is not a point that usually ruins ... Misha, in this case it is it ...
In Guam, Seleznev appeared before a judge who confirmed the legality (in the US legal field) of the arrest and further transportation of the carder to Seattle, where he was charged and sent to the SeaTac federal prison, refusing to be released on bail. The charges, which have awaited Roman since March 2011, included 40 counts of computer fraud, hacking, hacked bank accounts and identity theft of credit card holders. A long term of up to 38 years in prison was already on the horizon.
The arrest of nCux-a on an American warrant in Moscow was considered illegal, and parliamentarian Valery Seleznyov called his son's arrest a kidnapping and appealed for support to the Russian Foreign Ministry, where he was supported by a corresponding statement. “We regard what happened as another unfriendly step by Washington,”the statement read". It is not the first time that the American side, ignoring the 1999 bilateral Treaty on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters, is actually abducting a Russian citizen."
How it was
The Americans began to track the nickname nCux since 2002, from the very days when Roma first started selling "fullers" on carderplanet. In May 2010, Special Agent of the US State Security Service David Dunn took part in an operation in Idaho, in the city of Coeur d'Alen, which was carried out in a restaurant of the famous fast food chain Shlotsky's Deli over the leakage of visitors' credit cards. He examined the computer equipment there and found that Shlotsky's Deli was connected to a Russian IP address. David took note of this fact, and a few weeks later, a lot of stolen credit cards surfaced on the network, which were tracked to the location of the data leak, and this point turned out to be the computer of Schlotsky's restaurant.
In connection with the leak, a US citizen was arrested, suspected of installing malware on the Shlotzky network. Detective Dunn examined the suspect's confiscated computer and found that the guy was browsing two sites: Track2.name and Bulba.cc and chatting with a person named Track2.
Further verification showed that the carder under the nickname Track2 has its own online store of stolen cards and is advertised on the carder.su forum. However, it turned out that the store site, Track2.tv was under ddos attack, but the other bulba.cc site was working.
The detective began to research these sites to find out who is hiding under the aforementioned nicknames. After examining the information about the domain, he determined the e-mail box from which the registration took place. Later I discovered other mailboxes located in the United States, also associated with these accounts.
The East Virginia District supported a collaborative investigation of the case with CIS, and in October 2010 they began collecting warrants for information and evidence. Detective Dunn knew it would take some time.
And while he waited for the warrant, on October 21, 2010, a second hack took place - this time at one of the oldest restaurants, Broadway Grill on Capitol Hill in Washington.
Dunn arrived in Washington and, along with a local detective, began researching point-of-sale computers. They found out that the servers, which stored the data of 32 thousand bank cards in the form of simple text files, were very poorly protected. The information from these computers was leaked to the same IP address that was used on computers at Shlotsky's Deli in Idaho.
Detective Dunn realized that he now had the opportunity to investigate a crime at home, so there was no longer a need to travel to Virginia or Idaho and a case could be brought here in the western area of Washington.
Then the case began to develop rapidly. From November 2010 to February 2011, American services found out who was behind the carder sites. Detective Dunn identified the Yahoo mailboxes that led to the HopOne server, from where the stolen card data was sent to a server in Russia.
Dunn found out who owned the HopOne server. He conducted a penetration test of the Yahoo server in order to trace the incoming and outgoing connections. At this stage, he could not get access to the contents of the server, but he was able to establish the IP addresses of incoming and outgoing connections, the numbers of some ports and the amount of data transferred. He saw that this server was connected to hundreds of computers throughout the United States, and many of them were installed in cafes and restaurants.
The detective discovered many hacking tools on the HopOne server that allowed him to recreate the scheme of Seleznev and his team. They scanned the ports of the victims' servers for open RDP connections. By brute-force passwords, hackers tried to break into these servers. Map data was uploaded to the attackers' servers under the Shmak / Smaus nicknames with IP address 188.120.255.66, HopOne server with IP 66.36.240.69 and Ukrainian server with IP 188.95.159.20. From there, the data was sent to the sites of carders - sellers under the nicknames Track2 and Bulba, which belonged to Seleznev. But this detective could only guess and look for evidence against the Russian hacker.
The Yahoo mailbox, which was used to register the server on which the nicknames Shmak, Smaus, Track2 and Bulba appeared, was also linked to the HopOne server. In addition to the above, detectives on HopOne found nearly 400,000 credit card numbers. Credit card details were sorted by the IP addresses from which they were leaked. This made it possible to quickly identify all victims and collect more evidence.
The carder's ball was gradually unraveling. And the email addresses were brought to Selezneva. He used one of the addresses of the Yahoo mail service, which received various notifications. In the box [email protected] detectives discovered a letter about the successful registration of Roman Seleznev in the PayPal payment system on September 19, 2009. It was a real fiasco. Beginning of the End.
It was this fact that was one of the strongest evidence against Roman, in addition to the information that BadB, who had been arrested earlier, had already leaked to detectives.
Seleznev did not even think that the data on user registration is meticulously saved by the US payment systems in full. And this is not just a rule, it is a requirement. The data that he indicated also included the address of his registration in Vladivostok, which later served to identify his identity during his arrest.
Another account [email protected] that detectives discovered was used by Roman many years ago in 2006. It was this mailbox that helped establish the connection between Seleznev and his first nickname nCux. Having gained access to the contents of the address, the Americans even tracked how Seleznev, aka nCux, courted his wife, ordering flower delivery for her. The detectives found a postcard with the words: “You are the most beautiful, but Eve is still more beautiful than you”!
Eva is the name of his daughter, which was also entered in the passport, and served as another proof of identification during the arrest. The post office also found his order in an online store with delivery to his home address in Vladivostok.
In the end, the most significant piece of evidence was found on the HopOne server, where he and his associates stored their hacking tools. Seleznev saved on this server information about booking air tickets for the Indonesia-Singapore flight, and his personal data and the number of his foreign Russian passport were indicated in the booking form. The coincidence of the data of this order with the data of the passport served as further evidence at the time of his arrest. Such a ridiculous mistake could be made in two cases. Either he was not himself, or he wanted to go to jail. There is no third. But what's done is done.
The Secret Service has put all this evidence together. But even after that, the agents continued to look for Seleznev's involvement in other cybercrimes. All carders are somehow related to each other. And if you remember, the investigation began with the
carder community CarderPlanet. A certain Mr. Carranza associated with the forum was one of the detainees back in 2003. In his computer, correspondence was found between him and nCux111, who provided his real data - name, surname, home address in Vladivostok, two emails, including [email protected]. This information Karranza used to deal with the investigation.
After collecting all this evidence, Detective Dunn and the attorney's office went to jury in 2011. They received an indictment, which imputed to Roman Seleznev, known by 9 hacker nicknames, of committing computer crimes, fraud with bank cards and using funds to hack traffic.
Where Dreams May Come
This guy had a difficult childhood. Difficult youth. Luxurious youth. What old age awaits him? Probably, you yourself already understood everything. Roman Seleznev evokes conflicting emotions. You can hate him, you can admire his tenacity or scoff at the mistakes he made. But it cannot be denied that all events in his life are connected with each other. And who knows exactly how you would have acted in his place.
And also in his life there were people who somehow influenced Roma. People he trusted. He saw his father several times throughout his childhood. The boy was not needed by his dad, who was building his political career in the capital with might and main. But as soon as the carder has the first million, his father Valery Seleznev appears with him in his life. They often met in Moscow, where Psycho periodically "had" to fly in order to "collect" profits.
Almost all serious cyber fraudsters remember Webmoney's "depositories", first on Pyatnitskaya, then on Sadovnicheskaya Embankment and on Ordzhonikidze. Carders, such as Seleznev, carried money out of these semi-basements in bags. Roma was no exception. On one of these visits, Valery contacted his son and offered to meet in his office at the Ukraine Hotel, where an amazing family reunion took place. After that, Roma periodically visited his ancestor, who instructed him on the right path, offering to invest in his "long-term construction" in Vladivostok. It is not known how much, but Roman periodically supplied his father with money. Parental debt ended up in the millions. It is known that after the arrest of Seleznev the younger, Seleznev senior opened his son's cell in one of the banks of Vladivostok and extracted several million dollars from there, which his son had saved for a rainy day. The fate of real estate in Bali is unknown to this day.
After the arrest of his son, the father started a stormy activity. Either attracting lawyers worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, then distributing incomprehensible "thanks" to the Russian Foreign Ministry, or expressing protests.
Deputy Valery Selezev, Roman's father.
It is difficult to imagine what kind of information Valery Seleznev had, but sometimes his advice to his son seemed surreal, unless of course we assume that Seleznev Sr. did not at all want Roma's early release. Knowing the stories of Yaroshenko and Bout, it was difficult to imagine that in the situation with Seleznev, the United States would behave in any other way. The Americans had 100% proof of Seleznev's guilt. And even if you believe in the version of the protection that the laptop with the stolen information was planted on Seleznev, there were still Tsurikov and Khorokhorin. Both are closely acquainted with Psycho and his activities, actively cooperated with the investigation. Even the best lawyers in the world couldn't help. Roman could only help himself. Make a deal with the investigation or admit your guilt. And perhaps now he would already be at large.
But his father continued to assure him that there were some options for "Uncle Andrei", a political solution to the issue and "improving the international situation", doing all this over the prison phone. Thus, playing into the hands of the Americans, who are repeating about the corruption of Russian politics, thereby worsening the conditions of detention and relations with the investigation for the son. Even a fool knew that the conversation would be recorded, listened to and analyzed. The consequences were indeed. The case really took on a political color, and Roman was sent alone. The last hopes of cooperation were lost, the Americans were furious. The situation looked doubly stupid, since Seleznev either started cooperation, then stopped it, then played for time, then changed lawyers, then turned to the options of "Uncle Andrey". All this is under the leadership of Valery Seleznev.
During his imprisonment, Roman initially refused to cooperate, but then changed his mind and repeatedly offered his services and tried to provide valuable information. He managed to get a meeting with special agents, during which he revealed to the authorities the names of many participants in carding forums from 2005 to 2014. But the Secret Service refused to cooperate because most of this information was already known. In addition, Roman made some statements that were deliberately false, which nullified the value of cooperation.
The "Uncle Andrey" option really worked, infuriating not only the agents, but also the judge. Prior to the hearing, the defense filed a notice of withdrawal due to a disagreement with the client. The meeting from May 2015 was postponed to November. The postponement of the case led to additional costs due to the fact that the witnesses in the case had already flown to the trial in Seattle from Sri Lanka, from Honolulu and Chicago.
Before the verdict, Seleznev wrote a handwritten letter to the court, in which he briefly retells his biography, talking about a difficult childhood and how, trying to make money, he got on the slippery slope of caring.
“I tried to find a job on the Internet, and everything went downhill. I chose the wrong path. "
But it was already too late. As well as before the terrorist attack in Marrakesh, when he was told: "It's a bad idea." But he had already made his choice and there was no turning back.
THE END
Seleznev was sentenced in April 2017, when the story of the alleged interference of Russian hackers in the US presidential election had been on everyone's lips for several months. He was given 27 years - the longest sentence ever given to a cybercriminal in the United States. “I am a political prisoner. I am a tool for the US government, - said Seleznev after the verdict. “They want to send a signal to the whole world using me as a pawn. Given my head injury, today's sentence can be considered fatal”.
His father called the decision "the verdict of the cannibals." In September 2017, Seleznev pleaded guilty in two more cases - in which losses amounted to about $ 52 million.
P.S. If right now you are faced with a choice - think carefully and look around. The universe, God or the matrix, or someone you believe in will definitely give you a sign. And no matter what the past is behind you - your future is in your hands.
P.P.S. Roma Seleznev is currently in a specialized medical prison in North Carolina, FCI Butner Medium. Due to the epidemiological situation, he is in his cell for 24 hours. He hopes for a pardon for Trump, or at least for the fact that during the epidemic he will be allowed to live under guard outside the prison. Locked up, his chances of survival are not great. Current release date: 07/06/2037. If you want to cheer up a guy, write letters:
ROMAN SELEZNEV
Register Number: 04385-093
FCI Butner Medium II
P.O. BOX 1500
BUTNER, NC 27509
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Primary sources:
- Sentencing Memorandum, filed on April 14, 2017, document 464 in case 2: 11-cr-00070-RAJ Download
- Appendix to the memorandum on sentencing, registered on April 17, 2017, document 467 Download
- Memorandum on sentencing by the defense dated 04/14/2017, document 466 Download
- Letter to the judge with remorse and confessions dated 10.04.2017, document 463 Download
- Request to classify (edit) parts of the confession letter (Defendant's Motion to Seal), 04/03/2017, document 458 Download
- Translations of phone conversations between prisoner Roman Seleznev and his father on how to postpone the hearing as long as possible in order to use the “Uncle Andrei's version”. Father offered to pretend to be sick or to stop communicating with lawyers, 09/25/2015, document 185-1 Download
- Victim Restitution Amounts per Victim Financial Loss Restitution Statements, 14.4.2017, document 464-1 Download
Also:
- United States' Notice of Filing Paper Materials with the Clerk, 04/14/2017, Doc 465
- Transcript of interrogation of a witness regarding the reliability of the amount of damage caused for 3715 banks (WOOD - Cross), 04/14/2017, document 466-1
- Letter of condolences to Roman Seleznev from King Mohammed VI of Morocco in 2011 expressing condolences after the terrorist attack in Marrakesh, 14.4.2017, document 466-2
- Extract from the medical history from 2011 from the Federal Medical Biophysical Center named after A.I.Burnazyan in Moscow, April 14, 2017, document 466-3
- Hospitalization certificate from the prison hospital dated 05/29/2015, where the patient was prescribed Elavil, 04/14/2017, document 466-4
- Discharge epicrisis from the Center for Speech Pathology and Neurorehabilitation, Moscow, from 2011, April 14, 2017, document 466-5
- Examination by a gastroenterologist-hepatologist dated 03/20/2012 from the MedElit medical center, Moscow, 04/14/2017, document 466-6
The article used materials:
- From sporaw.ru
- Meduza.io materials
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. It's a ridiculous amount, but I don't like to talk about money.
