[IP] Three guilty of identity fraud which netted millions
Begin forwarded message:
From: Brian Randell <Brian.Randell@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: December 1, 2006 10:36:58 AM EST
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Three guilty of identity fraud which netted millions
Hi Dave:
This is in today's (UK) Guardian, at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,1961441,00.html
Cheers
Brian
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Three guilty of identity fraud which netted millions
David Pallister
Friday December 1, 2006
The Guardian
On the eve of "Black Thursday", the Russian banks' liquidity crisis
of August 1995, Anton Dolgov, the head of the Moskovsky Gorodskoi
Bank, disappeared leaving debts of around $100m.
Yesterday, after hiding behind dozens of aliases, Dolgov stood in the
dock of a London court as the head of an international identity theft
gang that had defrauded thousands of account holders out of millions
of pounds.
Police believe the internet-based enterprise, which operated from
Notting Hill, west London, ran undetected for 10 years. Huge numbers
of compromised credit cards were used to buy electrical goods, later
sold to customers on eBay, and to gamble on sporting fixtures.
A library of false documents and a bogus firm of solicitors were used
to generate fictitious identities and open hundreds of bank accounts
to hold the huge amounts of illicit cash flooding in.
Dolgov, who pleaded guilty at Harrow crown court to four conspiracy
charges under one of his false names, Anton Gelonkin, was caught
after his headquarters stuffed with state-of-the-art computers and
encryption software - was broken into. The police were called.
Nothing had been stolen but they made a note of his name - Gelonkin.
Weeks earlier, police had raided the Spanish end of his operation.
The raid resulted in an international warrant for Anthony Peyton -
alias Gelonkin. The Interpol notice was picked up in London and the
serious and organised crime organisation launched Operation Tertiary.
In January last year Dolgov's offices were raided, but the haul would
almost certainly have been much greater had not one of the gang's
members, Estonian Aleksei Kostap, thrown a power switch which blanked
out the bank of computers on which the operation relied and triggered
layers of encryption.
Despite the evidence against him, including false passports bearing
his photograph, Kostap, 31, insisted he had been framed. But after an
18-day trial he was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud and
perverting the course of justice. He, Dolgov and a Lithuanian,
Romanos Vasilauskas, 24, who pleaded guilty to possessing three false
passports with intent, will be sentenced on December 13.
David Hewett, prosecuting, told the court Gelonkin was the "general
manager", while a shadowy figure called Kaljussar was thought to be
the mastermind. Their scheme was based on huge numbers of false
identities and compromised credit cards in the UK, US and Spain and
several other European countries.
--
School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE1 7RU, UK
EMAIL = Brian.Randell@xxxxxxxxx PHONE = +44 191 222 7923
FAX = +44 191 222 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/~brian.randell/
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