A newly unsealed US indictment charges Vladislav Klyushin and four other Russian nationals over alleged involvement in a global hacking and trading scheme, Acting US Attorney Nathaniel Mendell said on Monday
WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 20th December, 2021) A newly unsealed US indictment charges Vladislav Klyushin and four other Russian nationals over alleged involvement in a global hacking and trading scheme, Acting US Attorney Nathaniel Mendell said on Monday.
"Klyushin is charged with a sophisticated and lucrative scheme in which he and his co-defendants are alleged to have hacked into companies that handle nonpublic information for large publicly traded companies, gained access to earnings reports and other market moving information before it was public, and then traded stocks based on that nonpublic information," Mendell said. "With this scheme, they made millions of Dollars for themselves."
Klyushin and four other Russian nationals are charged in two indictments unsealed today in Boston, he added.
The US Justice Department said in a press release that the indictment alleges Klyushin and co-conspirators, Ivan Yermakov, Nikolai Rumiantcev, Mikhail Irzak and Igor Sladkov hacked into the computer networks of two US filing agents, used by publicly traded companies to make quarterly and annual filings, that between January 2018 and September 2020.
The group attempted to obtain data on the earnings of such companies ahead of publication of their financial results, the release said. This information was used by Klyushin and his co-defendants to know in advance whether a company's share price will go up or down, and was used to trade the shares accordingly, the release added.
The defendants allegedly made at least $82 million in profit by using the stolen data, according to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Mendell said the sophisticated intrusion technologies that were used by the hacking group are not unique for Russia and a number of other countries specialize in this kind of capabilities.
Klyushin, Yermakov and Rumiantcev worked at M-13, an IT company in Moscow that provided services for the President of the Russian Federation, the Russian government and a range of other Federal and state entities in Russia, the release said.
Ivan Yermakov was charged in July 2018 in connection with a hacking and influence effort related to the 2016 US elections. In October 2018, Yermakov was also charged with an alleged hacking that targeted international anti-doping agencies, sporting federations, and officials, the release added.
Klyushin was arrested in Switzerland in March 2021 upon the US request and was extradited to Boston, Massachusetts over the weekend after a Swiss court satisfied the respective US request while the other four co-defendants remain at large, according to the release.
If found guilty, each defendant faces up to 30 years in prison for conspiracy to obtain unauthorized access to computers, and to commit wire fraud and securities fraud combined with substantial fine and several years of supervised release.
