iscover
Share this article on:
Powered by
MOMENTUM
MEDIA
Pavel Kublitskii and Alexandr Khodyrev were arrested and charged last week for their alleged role as administrators on a credit card fraud forum.
The FBI has revealed the details of an investigation into a Russian language carding forum, which has led to the arrest of a pair of Russian nationals residing in the United States.
Pavel Kublitskii and Alexandr Khodyrev were arrested last week after the District Court for the Middle District of Florida granted an arrest warrant for the pair after the FBI presented the court with an affidavit outlining their criminal activity.
What makes the arrest particularly noteworthy is that the two men had requested and been granted asylum in the US in 2022. Despite being unemployed, the pair had been living lavish lifestyles, buying luxury apartments and sports cars.
Prior to their arrival in the US, however, the FBI had already begun investigating the carding – the criminal term of credit card fraud – forum known as WWH. In July 2020, the FBI linked the forum to US web hosting company DigitalOcean, and after serving a warrant to the company, the bureau was able to obtain a copy of the entire server that hosted the illegal forum.
The FBI described WWH as “like a cross between eBay and Reddit”. It offered a wide range of criminal services while also providing message boards with “resources to assist individuals in using stolen credit card information and PII to make purchases and generate revenue”, according to the affidavit.
The site even ran a paid course teaching every aspect of credit card fraud and charged membership fees to generate its own revenue.
As of 2023, the site had 353,000 users.
Having studied the copied server, an FBI agent joined the site as a member in earlier 2023, signed up for the paid training course, and even purchased the personal data of some 20 US citizens living in Florida, all on the course of an investigation to determine WWH’s owners. This led to a wave of search warrants being executed on 95 email addresses linked to the administrators and moderators of the forum.
According to the FBI, “the data returned from these search warrants revealed that many of these email accounts are linked to each other and used by KUBLITSKil and/or KHODYREV to administer WWH Club, as well as for other purposes, including personal ones”.
FBI investigators also followed a cryptocurrency trail linking 90 crypto payments to Kublitskii. Other transactions were linked to Khodyrev.
It’s also worth noting that the forum and much of its communications were in Russian, which the FBI used Google Translate to understand.
Kublitskii and Khodyrev were charged with conspiracy to traffic in unauthorised access devices and conspiracy to possess 15 or more unauthorised access devices. The pair could face up to 20 years in prison.
As of writing, the forum is still in operation on other hosting infrastructure.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
Be the first to hear the latest developments in the cyber industry.
