A Ukrainian national believed to have taken part in the 2008 cyberattack targeting the payment processing company RBS WorldPay has been extradited to the United States.
Evgeny Tarasovich Levitskyy, 31, of Nikolaev, Ukraine, was arraigned last week in an Atlanta court on charges related to his role as lead casher in the RBS WorldPay scheme. Levitskyy was charged last year with bank fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
If convicted, the suspect could spend up to 30 years in prison and he could be ordered to pay a maximum fine of $1 million for each count.
According to authorities, a team of hackers breached the systems of RBS WorldPay in November 2008 and gained access to data associated with payroll debit cards, which are used by companies to pay their employees.
The attackers raised the limits on compromised accounts to $1 million and used a network of money mules to withdraw more than $9 million from over 2,100 ATMs in at least 280 cities worldwide. The fraudsters used 44 counterfeit payroll debit cards and managed to complete the operation within 12 hours. The hackers then attempted to destroy the data on the payment processor’s network in an effort to hide their activity.
Levitskyy, who is also known as Vinchenco, Vinch and M.U.R.D.E.R.E.R., is believed to be the lead casher as he managed to withdraw nearly $500,000 from a single account. The suspect was extradited from the Czech Republic.
At the time of the attack, RBS WorldPay, currently known only as Worldpay, was the U.S. payment processing division of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC in Atlanta, Ga. That is why all the suspects in this case have been charged in the Northern District of Georgia.
Levitskyy is one of the 14 individuals prosecuted so far. The list includes people from Russia, Estonia, Moldova, Ukraine, Nigeria and the United States.
One of the main hackers involved in the scheme, Estonian national Sergei Nicolaevich Tšurikov, was sentenced in 2014 to 11 years in prison and ordered to pay restitution totaling $8.4 million.
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Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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