A Russian national was sentenced on Thursday for his role in an online marketplace that traded in identity theft and credit card fraud, costing its victims over $50 million in damages. Roman Valeryevich Seleznev (alias “Track2,” “Bulba” and “Ncux”) was sentenced by federal judges in the Northern District of Georgia and in the District of Nevada after pleading guilty to racketeering and conspiracy to commit bank fraud, according to a statement by the Department of Justice. He was ordered to pay a restitution of over $53 million.
Seleznev admitted to being involved in an online criminal marketplace, Carder.su, which in his own admission was an “Internet-based, international criminal enterprise whose members trafficked in compromised credit card account data and counterfeit identifications and committed identity theft, bank fraud, and computer crimes,” according to the DOJ. Seleznev also ran his own automated website where he sold compromised credit card account data and counterfeit I.D.s. The website did so much business that customers could “search for the particular type of credit card information they wanted to buy, add the number of accounts they wished to purchase to their “shopping cart” and upon check out, download the purchased credit card information.” Payments were deducted from an account funded through L.R., an online digital currency payment system. Last year, Seleznev was sentenced to 27 years for his role in a scheme to “hack into point-of-sale computers to steal and sell credit card numbers to the criminal underworld.”