In one of the biggest cybercrimes in history, federal prosecutors say, three men stole data on more than 100 million people from a dozen companies’ computers and used a vast global network of accomplices to turn it into hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal profits.
Indictments unsealed Tuesday in Manhattan and Atlanta accused the men and hundreds of their accomplices of carrying out last year’s big data breach at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and a host of other crimes around the world—involving computer networks in South Africa and Brazil, money laundered through Cyprus and illegal credit-card payments processed in Azerbaijan.
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara on Tuesday said this “diversified criminal conglomerate” was “breathtaking” in the size and scope of its hacking.
The indictments allege the three defendants and their associates hacked into banks and other companies to obtain customer information that they later used in a pump-and-dump stock scheme. Meanwhile, the computer-hacking operation made possible a network of other criminal activity, including illegal Internet casinos, a payment processing service for other criminals and an unlicensed bitcoin exchange, prosecutors alleged.
Among the most lucrative was a pump-and-dump scheme, where the men would artificially inflate prices of penny stocks and then trick investors into buying them by sending spam to the email addresses they had stolen during the hacks. To further the scheme, the defendants sometimes engineered mergers with shell companies to create publicly traded stocks that could be manipulated, prosecutors said.
The mastermind of the enterprise, prosecutors allege, was Gery Shalon, a 31-year-old Israeli citizen and resident. The indictment described moments where he bragged about the success of his schemes, including the pump-and-dump one, which he allegedly called “a small step towards a large empire.”
When asked by a co-conspirator whether buying stocks in America was popular, Mr. Shalon allegedly responded: “It’s like drinking freaking vodka in Russia.”
