An Estonian man was sentenced on Wednesday to seven years in prison for taking part in two separate identity theft schemes.
Aleksandr Suvorov was sentenced on charges of wire fraud conspiracy and trafficking in unauthorized access devices, the Department of Justice said in a statement on Wednesday. He pleaded guilty in May 2009 to hacking into the national restaurant chain Dave & Buster’s and stealing 81,005 credit card numbers. If that wasn’t enough, he pleaded guilty again in November 2011 for taking part scheme to sell more than 160,000 stolen credit card numbers to an undercover United States Secret Service agent.
These two incidents were filed as two cases, one in the Eastern District of New York and another in the Southern District of California. They were consolidated in New York for sentencing. Suvorov was also ordered to pay $675,000 in restitution and $300,000 in asset forfeiture judgement.
“Mr. Suvorov participated in a scheme to sell thousands of credit card numbers stolen from unsuspecting consumers,” Assistant Attorney General Breuer said in the statement.
According to court records, Suvorov, prolific identity thief Albert Gonzalez, and a third member of the gang came up with a plan to breach Dave & Buster’s computer networks and install information-stealing malware on the systems. Gonzalez is said to have sent the software to the third individual in Ukraine, who passed it on to Suvorov in Estonia to actually break in to the network and install it, prosecutors said.
In the other case, Suvorov provided an accomplice with stolen credit card numbers and the accomplice tried to sell them to an undercover agent.
Gonzalez and the third member have already been arrested and sentenced to 20 years and 30 years in prison, respectively.
Even though Suvorov was operating in Estonia, this case shows the United States government will chase cyber-criminals operating abroad and they will “suffer severe consequences for their crimes,” Breuer said.
Hackers and identity thieves in other countries preying on innocent American consumers, businesses and financial institutions will “find no refuge from U.S. criminal justice in any corner of the globe,” said United States Attorney Loretta Lynch.
“Suvorov reached across an ocean to victimize thousands of Americans,” said Lynch said.
