Crime

THE United States Attorney, Roger B. Handberg, has announced the culmination of a transnational cybercrime investigation involving the xDedic Marketplace. About 10 Nigerians are implicated in the conspiracy to commit wire fraud. 

The suspects are Adedotun Adejumo(45, Oklahoma) implicated for conspiracy to commit wire fraud 33 months; Pavlo Kharmanskyi (32, Ukraine) Access Device Fraud 30 months; Joshua Spencer(29, New York) Conspiracy to Commit Access Device Fraud 28 months; Ibrahim Jinadu(36, Georgia) Conspiracy to CommitWire Fraud 27 months

Brandon Williams(34, California) Conspiracy to CommitMail and Wire Fraud 12 months

Harold McKinzie(29, Illinois) Wire Fraud 5 years’ probation;

The others are Bamidele Omotosho(42, Nigeria) Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud Sentence pending;

Olayemi Adafin(38, United Kingdom); conspiracy to commit wire fraud, Sentence pending; Olakunle Oyebanjo (29, United Kingdom) Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud Sentence pending; Akinola Taylor (38, United Kingdom) Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud Sentence pending; Oluwarotimi Ogunlana (29, Texas) Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud, Sentence pending. Both and are pending extradition from the United Kingdom. 

Shodipe has also been charged with making false claims and theft of government funds. If convicted, Odedeyi and Shodipe each face a maximum penalty of 20 years in federal prison.

These cases were led by the Tampa Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Tampa Field Office of Internal Revenue Service – Criminal Investigation.

Substantial assistance was provided by the IRS-CI Cyber Crimes Unit (Washington, D.C.), the Department of Justice’s Office of International Affairs, and Homeland Security Investigations.

This investigation also benefited greatly from cooperation with foreign law enforcement in Belgium, Georgia, Germany, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom, Romania, Switzerland, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Moldova.

According to court documents, the xDedic Marketplace was a website on the dark web that illegally sold login credentials (usernames and passwords) to servers located across the world and personally identifiable information—dates of birth and Social Security numbers—of U.S. residents.

Once purchased, criminals used these servers to facilitate a wide range of illegal activity that included tax fraud and ransomware attacks. 

The xDedic administrators practiced exceptional operational security, operating the website across a widely distributed international network, and utilizing cryptocurrency in order to hide the locations of the Marketplace’s underlying servers and the identities of its administrators, sellers, and buyers.

In total, xDedic offered more than 700,000 compromised servers for sale, including at least 150,000 in the United States and at least 8,000 in Florida. Marketplace victims spanned the globe and industries, including local, state, and federal government infrastructure, hospitals, 911 and emergency services, call centers, major metropolitan transit authorities, accounting and law firms, pension funds, and universities.

In January 2019, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida (Tampa Division) seized xDedic’s domain names and dismantled the website’s infrastructure, effectively ceasing its operation. The international operation to dismantle and seize this infrastructure was the result of close cooperation with law enforcement authorities in Belgium and Ukraine, the European law enforcement agency Europol, the National High Tech Crime Unit from the Dutch National Police, and the German Bundeskriminalamt.

In the years that followed the takedown of the xDedic Marketplace, the U.S. Attorney’s Office investigated and charged individuals involved in every level of the website’s operation, including its administrators, server sellers, and buyers.

For example, Alexandru Habasescu and Pavlo Kharmanskyi were Marketplace administrators. Habasescu, who resided in Chisnau, Moldova, was the lead developer and technical mastermind for the Marketplace, while Kharmanskyi, who lived in Kiev, Ukraine, advertised for the website, paid administrators, and provided customer support to buyers. Habasescu was taken into custody in the Spanish Canary Islands in 2022 and extradited to the United States, while Kharmanskyi was arrested at the Miami International Airport in 2019 as he attempted to enter the United States. Habasescu and Kharmanskyi were sentenced to 41 and 30 months’ imprisonment, respectively.

Marketplace seller Dariy Pankov, a Russian national, was one of the highest sellers on the Marketplace by volume, listing for sale the credentials of more than 35,000 compromised servers located all over the world and obtaining more than $350,000 in illicit proceeds.

Pankov’s criminal activities were facilitated by a powerful malicious software program he developed named “NLBrute,” that was capable of compromising protected computers by decrypting login credentials. Pankov was taken into custody in the Republic of Georgia in 2022 and extradited to the United States. He was subsequently sentenced to 60 months in federal prison.

Nigerian national Allen Levinson was a prolific buyer on the Marketplace who held particular interest in purchasing access to U.S.-based Certified Public Accounting firms. He used the information he obtained from those servers to file hundreds of false tax returns with the United States government, requesting more than $60 million in fraudulent tax refunds. Levinson was taken into custody in the United Kingdom in 2020 and extradited to the United States. He was subsequently sentenced to 78 months in federal prison.

Many of the charged defendants are foreign nationals and hold citizenship in countries that do not extradite their nationals, requiring the United States to locate and extradite subjects from countries that do.  As identified in the table below, to date, 17 defendants have been charged and/or extradited to the United States.

Name(Age, Nationality)   Offense of Conviction  Term of Imprisonment

Allen Levinson(31, Nigeria) Conspiracy to Commit Mail and Wire Fraud 78 months

T’Andre McNeely(33, California) Conspiracy to CommitMail and Wire Fraud 78 months

Michael Carr(33, California) Conspiracy to CommitMail and Wire Fraud 78 month

Dariy Pankov(29, Russia) Conspiracy to CommitAccess Device and Computer Fraud 60 months

Glib Ivanov-Tolpintsev(29, Ukraine) Conspiracy to CommitAccess Device and Computer Fraud 48 months

Alexandru Habasescu(31, Moldova) Access Device Fraud 41 months.

The cases are being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Rachel K. Jones, Carlton C. Gammons, and Suzanne Nebesky.- With reports from Everydaynewsngr

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-January 6, 2024 @ 5:34 GMT|

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