Fergie's Tech Blog

Tracking the Russian Scammers

Kim Zetter writes on Wired News:

Dmitry Ivanovich Golubov, a 22-year-old Ukrainian who went by the nickname "Script," was considered one of the godfathers of Eastern European carding rings. As one of the leaders of CarderPlanet, authorities say Golubov facilitated the theft and international trading of millions of credit and debit card numbers that resulted in multimillion-dollar losses to banks and merchants over several years.

So when Ukrainian police finally nabbed Golubov in the summer of 2005 it was a coup, representing the culmination of dogged investigative work by U.S. Postal Inspector Greg Crabb and other law enforcement officials in the United States.

"Golubov was such a high-profile target," Crabb told Wired News. "The Secret Service, FBI and myself were working Golubov in different districts over the United States trying to get some inroads into where he was coming from."

But achieving the arrest wasn't easy. While U.S. authorities collared numerous small-time crooks in the United States who used the stolen card numbers that Golubov's ring distributed, efforts to nab Golubov himself proved futile for three years, due to indifference from Ukrainian authorities.

posted by Fergie @ 1/31/2007 11:15:00 AM