Roman Seleznev, a convicted Russian cybercriminal already serving prison time for hacking American businesses, was sentenced Thursday for a couple unrelated computer fraud cases.
U.S. District Judge Steve Jones sentenced Seleznev to 14 years in prison in connection with separate cases handled by federal prosecutors in Nevada and Georgia, the Department of Justice said in a statement.
Known online by aliases including “Track2” and “Bulba,” the hacker participated in criminal schemes that resulted in losses totaling nearly $60 million, the statement said.
Seleznev was arrested abroad in 2014 and ultimately charged in several states with hacking and defrauding American victims.
In Nevada, prosecutors charged Seleznev with operating Carder.su, a “carding” website known for facilitating the sale of stolen credit card data and other personally identifiable information and causing losses totally $50.1 million.
Federal prosecutors in Atlanta separately charged Seleznev in relation to hacking a local company and then stealing debit card numbers subsequently used to fraudulently withdraw over $9.4 million from thousands of ATMs in 280 cities during an hourslong international crime spree in 2008 in which he personally cashed out more than $2 million.
Seleznev pleaded guilty Sept. 9 to one count of racketeering in connection to the carding site site and a count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud with respect to the ATM scam. He received 168 months Thursday for each of of the pleas, the Justice Department said.
Seleznev was ordered in April to spend 27 years in federal prison over unrelated hacking charges brought in Washington state, and the punishment handed down Thursday will run concurrently, along with previously announced sentence, the department said.
In the Washington case, a jury convicted Seleznev in Seattle federal court last year on 38 counts related to breaching the point-of-sale computers of area businesses and stealing credit card numbers to sell online.
Seleznev was taken into custody in 2014 in Maldives, a nation in the Indian Ocean, and caught with a laptop containing more than 1.7 million stolen credit card numbers along with over evidence linking him to the point-of-sale hacks, according to the Justice Department.
Russia has opposed his arrest, and its Foreign Ministry has referred to it as a “de facto” kidnapping.
Igor Litvak, Seleznev’s attorney, previously said he planned to ask President Trump to let his client serve his sentence in Russia, state-owned media reported.
Washington does not have an extradition treaty with Moscow, and the Justice Department has more than once apprehended Russians while they vacationed abroad. Russian citizens Pyotr “Peter” Levashov and Alexander Vinnik were arrested this year for unrelated hacking charges while vacationing in Spain and Greece, respectively, and both are currently fighting extradition to the U.S.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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