In light of the development of the story about the hacker group The Infraud Organization, a source of the telegram channel of the Cheka-OGPU and Rucriminal.info, who is a relative of one of the direct participants in the criminal organization, shared interesting details about the scale of their activities in Russia.
In January of this year, we published information about a special operation carried out by the FSB against members of Infraud. At the same time, under articles 272 (Illegal access to computer information) and 187 (Illegal circulation of means of payment) of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, criminal cases were initiated against the persons who led the group: Andrey Novak, Estonian citizen Kirill Samokutyaev, Mark Bergman and Konstantin Bergman, who are still in custody. under investigation.
In order to understand what exactly is happening now in this case, let's go back a little to the history of this organization. As we wrote earlier, The Infraud Organization, founded by Ukrainian hacker Svyatoslav Bondarenko, has been successfully operating since at least 2010. The turnover of the organization was estimated at billions of US dollars. However, the internal life of the group was accompanied by regular showdowns, banal theft from themselves and the redistribution of power throughout their existence.
So, in 2015, after a financial dispute with one of the members of the group, Bondarenko suddenly “disappears” under mysterious circumstances. His place is taken by Sergey Medvedev, who himself was arrested in Bangkok in 2018 at the request of the US FBI, and in March 2021 was sentenced to 10 years in prison. By the way, we recall that at the time of detention, 100 thousand BTC or $6 billion at the current rate were found on his wallet, but after a short time they disappeared without a trace (where they are is still unknown).
After the elimination of Medvedev, the company of Novak, Samokutyaev and Bergmanov comes to the fore (as Rucriminal.info learned from a source, Mark and Konstantin Bergman are not actually relatives - before the change of surnames they were Rizaev and Sinichkin). All this time they worked on the territory of the Russian Federation and managed to build a very strong and extensive internal structure under them. The unconditional leadership in the group was defended by Mark Bergman, who, to ensure internal and external security, attracted existing special employees. services, taking them as a share (we will return to their positions and names a little later).
In the period from 2019 to 2022, having acquired influential patrons who guaranteed complete impunity, the activities of the organizing group for pumping crypto assets into the real world acquired an industrial scale. The structure of the organization became more complex and began to represent not a group of 4 amateur programmers, as law enforcement agencies believed, but a whole criminal community operating not only on the Internet, but also in the real world.
More than 4 structural divisions appeared in the organization (the security service from the current employees of the special services of the regional and federal levels, the cybercrime division, the division for legalization, fraud and raider seizures, theft of bank card data and other payment systems, as well as cashing out), run by Mark Bergman.
We already wrote earlier that when the group members were under surveillance in Moscow, the first thing that caught my eye was how openly the suspects behaved without observing even the minimum security measures. It was obvious that they had acted for a long time and arrived in full confidence that in the Russian Federation they were not in danger of being prosecuted.
The thing is that the current criminal activity in exchange for monthly payments and periodic bribes for high-ranking officials was covered by the all-powerful intelligence officers, providing complete external security. The same persons monitored the internal security of the organization, instantly sending the Infraud members themselves (who could shake the group’s activities in the event of internal financial disputes) to places not so remote, while guaranteeing that information about the criminal community from former accomplices would not be disclosed and would not entail landing of gang leaders.
One of the clearest examples of such a well-established scheme for eliminating elements dangerous to beneficiaries is a direct relative of Mark Bergman, who has long been a member of TIO and a partner of these individuals, but is currently serving a sentence, like a number of other members of the gang (we will also return to this topic separately) . Such a reliable cover, combined with high technological protection, guaranteed complete impunity for the activities of The Infraud Organization in the Russian Federation.
None of the organizers expected that after the emergence of direct agreements between the Presidents of Russia and the United States on cooperation in the field of combating cybercrime, events would develop according to the scenario already known to all: the leadership of the FSB receives from American materials, on the basis of which cases are immediately initiated against the members of the hacker group and the entire criminal scheme begins to crumble.
How and who exactly is now trying to break up the criminal case against hackers in order to save their source of income (and we are talking here, we recall, about billions of US dollars) will be described further.
Timofey Grishin
To be continued
Source: www.rucriminal.info
