Twenty-four prisoners were freed today in an international prisoner swap between Russia and Western countries. Among the eight Russians repatriated were several convicted cybercriminals. In return, Russia has reportedly released 16 prisoners, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and ex-U.S. Marine Paul Whelan.
Among those in the prisoner swap is Roman Seleznev, 40, who was sentenced in 2017 to 27 years in prison for racketeering convictions tied to a lengthy career in stealing and selling payment card data. Seleznev earned this then-record sentence by operating some of the underground’s most bustling marketplaces for stolen card data.
Roman Seleznev, pictured with bundles of cash. Image: US DOJ.
Once known by the hacker handles “Track2,” “Bulba” and “nCux,” Seleznev is the son of Valery Seleznev, a prominent member of the Russian parliament who is considered an ally of Vladimir Putin. U.S. prosecutors showed that for years Seleznev stayed a step ahead of the law by tapping into contacts at the Russian FSB, the successor agency to the Soviet KGB, and by periodically changing hacker handles.
But in 2014 Seleznev was captured by U.S. Secret Service agents, who had zeroed in on Seleznev’s posh vacation spot in The Maldives. At the time, the South Asian island country was a popular destination for Eastern Europe-based cybercriminals, who viewed it as beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement.
In addition to receiving a record prison sentence, Seleznev was ordered to pay more than $50 million in restitution to his victims. That loss amount equaled the total losses inflicted by Seleznev’s various carding stores, and other thefts attributed to members of the hacking forum carder[.]su, a bustling cybercrime community of which Seleznev was a leading organizer.
Also released in the prisoner swap was Vladislav Klyushin, a 42-year-old Muscovite sentenced in September 2023 to nine years in prison for what U.S. prosecutors called a “$93 million hack-to-trade conspiracy.” Klyushin and his crew hacked into companies and used information stolen in those intrusions to make illegal stock trades.
Klyushin likewise was arrested while vacationing abroad: The Associated Press reported that Klyushin was captured in Switzerland after arriving on a private jet, and just before he and his party were about to board a helicopter to whisk them to a nearby ski resort.
A passport photo of Klyushin. Image: USDOJ.
Klyushin is the owner of M-13, a Russian technology company that contracts with the Russian government. According to prosecutors, M-13 offered penetration testing and “advanced persistent threat (APT) emulation.” As part of his guilty plea, Klyushin was also ordered to forfeit $34 million, and to pay restitution in an amount that was to be determined.
The U.S. government says four of Klyushin’s alleged co-conspirators remain at large, including Ivan Ermakov, who was among 12 Russians charged in 2018 with hacking into key Democratic Party email accounts.
Among the Americans freed by Russia were Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, 32, who has spent the last 16 months in a Russian prison on spying charges. Also released was Alsu Kurmasheva, 47, a Russian American editor for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who was arrested last year; and Paul Whelan, 54, a former U.S. Marine arrested in 2018 and accused of spying.
The New York Times reports several others freed by Russia were German nationals, including German Moyzhes, a lawyer who was helping Russians obtain residence permits in Germany and other E.U. countries. The Times says Slovenia, Norway and Poland released four people accused of being Russian spies.
Reuters reports that Germany released Vadim Krasikov, an FSB colonel serving a life sentence there for murdering an exiled Chechen-Georgian dissident in a Berlin park.
Update, 8:47 p.m. ET:An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that one of the Russian hackers released was the BTC-e co-founder Alexander Vinnik. KrebsOnSecurity was unable to confirm his release. The above story has been edited to reflect that change.
are you sure vinnik was released? his name isn’t on the list of the people released by the us
You are correct. I screwed up. As I noted in the correction, a few reports I read said he was among those released, but that is not so.
Glad to see these heroes released. Filthy americans will pay for their tens of millions of murders of real human beings.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Want to buy a picture of your religion’s founder? I have some spicy ones.
Spoken like a true ______.
You still have the name Vinnik in the story.
Paul is a former Marine, not an Ex-Marine. We Marines don’t use EX. Good news for the swap. Now, Americans, stay out of Russia!
You are 100% correct.
Americans should stay away from that cesspool, and also not support politicians that are blackmailed or owned by Putin. So crazy how far the GOP has fallen. This used to be the party that was patriotic and did not like dictators.
Amen. So many of our fellow Americans assume that the U.S. government can rescue them anywhere.
Hopefully this is obvious by now: if you aren’t Russian and you travel to Russia, you are gambling with your freedom. You might be gambling with your freedom even if you are Russian (depending on who you pissed off).
Interesting game of chess the Russians play. The West incarcerates Russian criminals, and Russia incarcerates Western citizens on trumped up charges as Russia usually does, gives them a sham trial, and hands down ridiculous sentences. Then these poor people are used as bargaining chips with the West. Why we keep playing that same stupid game is beyond me.
Better to tell Westerners before they leave for Russia that if you are captured as a pawn behind the Iron Curtain “Vaya con Dios. Buena Suerte”. If the game is not played then the game will go away. Because I bet there are more Russians in the West to arrest than there are Westerners in Russia to arrest, LOL!
True, people westerners should know better than to travel to Russia and it’s also just possible that some of these people actually are spys for their governmentso or, as was the case with the US basketball player, violate the laws of the host country.
“and it’s also just possible that some of these people actually are spys”
Anything is possible. That’s why (our) courts prefer evidence to “possibilities”
> (our) courts prefer evidence to “possibilities”
citation needed
United States Federal Rules of Evidence:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre
Please cite a comparable Russian authority.
*** Our courts prefer evidence to “possibilities” ***
Tell that to the Japanese-AMERICANS incarcerated in various camps back in 1941.
Wartime emergencies can result in suspension of some laws, that’s the reality. There was evidence of Japanese attempts to sabotage the US war effort using nationals. Whether or not that threat overrode the rights temporarily of US citizens “legitimately” or not is a subject of debate now long after the fact, yet evidence is required for that as well.
But if you have to reach back to the last World War to make your “case” that the US legal system doesn’t require evidence, that too is evidence of something isn’t it.
While not the courts per se, recent governmental houndings of Huawei and TikTok, etc. are also much more ‘possibilities’ over evidence. Don’t drink the government/media koolaid too much. Applies to China, Russia, etc. and of course our own country too.
Huawei and Tiktok are not US companies and evade US laws while selling in US markets, so “houndings” is your China-centric worldview and not a fact per se. There are hundreds of companies sanctioned for various reasons and your mentioning these two as if “victims” on par with people who were interned during WWII… is just as desperate an argument, really.
US laws are certainly a lot more transparent and evenly applied towards companies and employees of other countries in Russia and China than you could say from the objective reverse perspective. See “Stars” coffee where Russia tookover Starbucks IP and locations, or “Delicious, that’s all” with the Golden Arches of McDonalds’ IP and logo at those locations that were also stolen and nationalized. Or did you think Starbucks and McDonalds actually were violating Russian laws, or security? Whataboutism seems to be your go-to reflex rather than a nuanced comparison. And no, I don’t think the US is completely innocent and above criticism, but it’s all about 1:1 comparisons rather than WW2 references amid defenses of China’s biggest IP thieves.
Case in point, try to sue in Russian or Chinese courts. Go ahead and find out how different these things work in the real world.
Sure, and all that unassailable “evidence” puts us with an incarceration rate of nearly twice that of Russia. I guess we just have a much more criminal society than they do. LOL
Being truthful, that is for a different reason than evidence, though. That is because incarceration is a state and private enterprise moneymaker in some of America. I could go on, but the ills are obvious. When a man with 91 felony counts and 31 convictions never spends a day in jail, the world can well laugh at us for good reason…
I was just on jury duty last week. We were all excused and went home because the defendant, on bond, just before voir dire changed his mind on self-representation and decided he wanted a lawyer. See, that is the system at work, but it doesn’t work right always everywhere in the US.
Jeffery Epstein and all his friends have entered the chat to tell you hogwash…
Yes, but it was Jeffery’s “friends” who maybe laid him to sleep with the worms because he had certain very dangerous kompromat on people even higher on the totem pole than him. And as we know about the totem pole, feces flows with gravity, not against it. In those circles, I’ll give you that Russians, Chinese, Indians and Americans are all the same.
You’re familiar with the old biker adage about how three men can keep a secret, right?
Kent Brockman if you’d like to make a 1:1 comparison of the US and Russian legal systems, might I suggest a closer look by yourself. Visit Russia waving a US flag and find out.
Yeah it’s infuriating that these people still go to ruzzia and make themselves targets of that criminal regime that is clearly using them as currency for the swap. There are not many of them but I’m really baffled by, “why are you going there?”
Gershkovich went there as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, at a time when it was believed that Putin would not dare to kidnap reporters. Many of the others exchanged were Russian citizens, dissidents jailed by the regime. And yes, some were foolish private citizens who took an unwise chance.
Even there I’m somewhat sympathetic. I’d love to see Saint Petersburg. Ten years ago I had plans to travel there. I’m not foolish enough to risk it now, but…
Harris didn’t want Trump negotiating this before the election as a show of foreign policy strength.
Trump as a private citizen does not have the executive authority to negotiate and exchange prisoners.
Trump is a private citizen and does not have the executive authority to negotiate and exchange prisoners on behalf of the U.S. government.
2pac.cc will be resurrected.. lol