Category Archives: Eastern District

Key witness in press-release hacking case is sentenced to time served

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It look like the legal troubles are over for Alexander Garkusha, one of the key figures in a case involving Wall Street high-rollers and Ukrainian hackers. U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie on Monday sentenced Garkusha, a Georgia real estate developer, to time served for his role in a $30 million scheme to trade stocks based on information gleaned from hacked press releases. The Russian-born U.S. citizen served as a cooperating witness against other defendants. Garkusha has, “in effect, been on probation” since his arrest in August 2015, his attorney said in a court filing. He was arrested in August 2015, along with four others, as part of a criminal securities fraud case that began after hackers breached PR Newswire, Marketwire and Business Wire and gathered unreleased financial news. Authorities said Garkusha traded on that inside information, and he pleaded guilty later that year to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Dearie this week cited Garkusha’s “thorough” and “compelling” testimony in the case […]

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Alleged Methbot scammer Zhukov asks judge for new attorney in ad fraud case

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Aleksandr Zhukov is not happy. The accused leader of an advertising fraud scheme that U.S. officials say defrauded international companies out of millions of dollars wrote a letter last week to Judge Edward Korman of the Eastern District of New York asking for assistance in finding new legal representation. Zhukov, in the note submitted Friday, asked the judge to appoint Simone Bertollini, a New York-based attorney, as his public defender. He hopes to hire Bertollini because of the attorney’s representation of Fabio Gasperini, an Italian man convicted in 2017 of operating a botnet of 100,000 hacked computers for malicious purposes. Bertollini would replace Igor Litvak, another New York-based attorney who withdrew from the case in March because of Zhukov’s inability to pay his legal fees. Litvak also appeared to be negotiating with prosecutors seeking a plea deal, though it’s clear now Zhukov intends to go to trial. In his letter to Korman, […]

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Third suspect in Methbot, 3ve case to plead not guilty after extradition from Malaysia

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A Kazakh national accused of helping coordinate an advertising fraud scheme that fleeced companies out of tens of millions of dollars will plead not guilty when he arrives in the U.S. to stand trial, his lawyer told CyberScoop. Sergey Ovsyannikov is scheduled to be extradited to the U.S. in the coming weeks, a Kazakh consulate official told CyberScoop last week. When Ovsyannikov arrives in court, he will plead not guilty to charges that he led the 3ve botnet-based scheme to falsify billions of advertisements, costing businesses $29 million between December 2015 and October 2018, according to defense attorney Arkady Bukh. “At the arraignment, the plea will be entered as not guilty,” Bukh said. “Then we’ll go over the [evidence] and…we’ll see if the government is in a position to prove any guilt.” His presence in court will mark the third time an accused member of the 3ve/Methbot group was extradited […]

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Accused ‘Methbot’ ringleader extradited to U.S.

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The accused ringleader of “Methbot,” an alleged digital ad fraud scheme, is scheduled to appear in Brooklyn court Friday to be arraigned on charges related to defrauding companies out of tens of millions of dollars. Aleksandr Zhukov, a 38-year-old Russian national, was extradited to the U.S. from Bulgaria Thursday, according to a spokesman for the Eastern District of New York. Zhukov is the lead defendant in the case, in which he and four other men are accused of renting more than 1,900 computer servers to simulate humans viewing ads on fabricated web pages. The group developed relationships with ad networks, which paid the Methbot group roughly $7 million in the fraud scheme, prosecutors said in a November indictment. Zhukov worked as the CEO of that group, described in the indictment as “Ad Network #1,” and directed roughly $5.4 million from one account into a corporate account located in New Zealand, prosecutors […]

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U.S. files charges in complex ad-fraud scheme that cost businesses tens of millions

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U.S. prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York filed a 13-count cybercrime indictment Tuesday against the suspected orchestrators of a scheme to defraud internet advertisers out of tens of millions of dollars. The indictment accuses the eight defendants, who hail from Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, with criminal violations including wire fraud, computer intrusion, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. The list includes Aleksander Zhukov, one of the Department of Justice’s recent high-profile cybercrime arrests. The group between September 2014 and December 2016 ran a purported advertising network, called “Ad Network #1,” that used 1,900 computer servers to load ads on more than 5,000 fabricated websites, prosecutors said. Defendants also leased some 650,000 IP addresses to falsify billions of visits to those fake websites, charging real companies for ads that real humans never viewed, the indictment alleges. “As alleged in court filings, the defendants in this case used sophisticated computer programming and infrastructure […]

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