A Ukrainian man, Vitalii Chychasov, has pleaded responsible in america to conspiracy to commit entry machine fraud and trafficking in unauthorized entry units by way of the now-shutdown SSNDOB Market.
The person was the administrator of the SSNDOB Market, a collection of internet sites that offered delicate private info of individuals in america, together with their full names, dates of beginning, and Social Safety Numbers (SSNs).
A legislation enforcement operation led to the seizure of {the marketplace} domains on June seventh, 2022. Earlier than that, the SSNDOB platform listed and offered the private particulars of 24 million folks, producing a gross sales income of over $19,000,000.
“Stolen Social Safety numbers can be utilized to commit quite a lot of frauds, together with United States tax fraud, unemployment insurance coverage fraud, mortgage fraud, bank card fraud, and the like,” reads the U.S. DoJ announcement.
“Investigators decided {that a} single purchaser from the positioning used stolen private figuring out info that he bought to steal and launder almost $10 million.”
Chychasov was arrested in March 2022 whereas he tried to enter Hungary and was subsequently extradited to the U.S. in July 2022.
Together with the responsible plea, the person additionally agreed handy over the domains “blackjob.biz”, “ssndob.membership”, and “ssndob.vip”, which have been used for committing the offenses.
A second SSNDOB administrator, Sergey Pugach, was additionally arrested in Could 2022.
The U.S. authorities recognized the 2 admins due to an investigation led by the cybercrime unit of the IRS and the FBI, and assisted by the U.S. DoJ and the authorities in Latvia and Cyprus.
Court docket paperwork reveal that the admins promoted SSNDOB through ads they created on varied websites on the darkish internet, reminiscent of different cybercrime marketplaces and hacker boards.
To stop the authorities from figuring out them, the directors solely accepted funds in hard-to-trace cryptocurrency and maintained servers for the web site in strategically chosen areas throughout the globe.
Chychasov now faces a most imprisonment penalty of 15 years and has additionally agreed to forfeit the quantity of $5,000,000, which might be the estimated crime proceeds.
