Two Russians serving time in U.S. prisons for computer hacking and multi-million dollar credit card theft have been included in a headline-grabbing prisoner swap deal with Moscow.
The two men — Vladislav Klyushin and Roman Seleznev — were sentenced to a combined 36 years in prison for hacking computer networks, insider trading and financial crimes. They were released Thursday as part of a complex prisoner swap between the U.S., Russia, Germany and several Western nations.
The prisoner swap included the return to the U.S. of journalist Evan Gershkovich and former marine Paul Whelan.
Klyushin, a wealthy businessman with known ties to the Kremlin, was serving nine years for his role in a nearly $100 million stock market cheating scheme that relied on secret earnings information stolen through the hacking of U.S. computer networks.
The U.S. Justice Department said Klyushin made those profits off of trades that were based on confidential corporate intel stolen from U.S. computer networks.
Seleznev was sentenced in 2017 to 27 years in prison for hacking into point-of-sale (PoS) computers and stealing credit card numbers.
He was convicted in August 2016 of 38 counts related to his scheme to hack PoS endpoints: 10 counts of wire fraud, eight counts of intentional damage to a protected computer, nine counts of obtaining information from a protected computer, nine counts of possession of 15 or more unauthorized access devices and two counts of aggravated identity theft.
Seleznev is the son of Russian politician Valery Seleznev, who accused the US of kidnapping when the hacker was arrested in the Maldives in 2014. The laptop Seleznev had in his custody when arrested contained over 1.7 million stolen credit card numbers (initially said to be 2.1 million), along with additional evidence linking the Russian to the servers, email accounts and financial transactions involved in the scheme.
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