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The Massachusetts federal prosecutor’s office in Boston reported that on May 26, 2020 magistrate judge David Hennessy indicted 28-year-old Vitaliy Antonenko, who was called “a citizen of Ukraine living in New York City.”
The fact that he is a nee or naturalized US citizen is not known. Vitaliy Antonenko was arrested on March 2, 2019 at the Kennedy New York International Airport, where he flew from Ukraine via Poland. In New York, federal agents had already been waiting for him and were met by orders of which Vitaly was detained at a checkpoint and found three laptop computers, two of which were without “hard drives”, two mobile phones and various information keepers, including “ flash drive "with a capacity of 4 gigabytes.
The arrest was attended by Sergei Vasiliev, a police detective at Harvard University, who, as stated in court documents, "participated in investigations of financial crimes committed over the Internet, including crimes with cryptocurrency." It is these crimes that Vitaliy Antonenko is accused of, having committed this in “conspiracy to commit computer hacking, selling stolen credit card numbers and money laundering”. The MacIntosh laptop that was seized from Antonenko during the arrest was turned on, and the screen was opened on the website “cvvme-store.su/partner/”. A detective of the Harvard Police Sergey Vasiliev, who was familiar with this site, showed that they sell credit card data, and the word “partner” means that Antonenko works with this site.
The press release of the prosecutor’s office briefly explained that Antonenko and his accomplices had searched the Internet in search of servers available for hacking, which contained “credit and debit card account numbers, their expiration dates, payment card confirmation and other personal data”. At the same time, the defendants and their accomplices used the well-known hacker program, “SQL injection,” which, as the silent interpreter says, “enables the attacker to execute an arbitrary query to the database and to read and / or write local files and execute arbitrary commands on the attacked server ".
When Vitaly’s accomplice was selling stolen data, Antonenko and the others used Bitcoin cryptocurrency along with ordinary bank transfers and laundered money, hiding all their data. Detective Sergei Vasilyev, the court found that the program SQL anything lawful is not engaged and that the seized Vitali flash drive was a file "60k Encrypted" with 60 thousands of credit card data on their number, expiration date, and the names and address of the holder
in the jargon of Russian IT specialists have long been included in the old word "wallet" (in our country - "wallet") - a means of instant money management directly on the Internet. Bitcoin wallet is a way of storing currency of electronic cryptocurrency Bitcoin, an analogue of a bank account that works anonymously, instantly and around the clock.
The key to this wallet is stored in an encrypted password protected wallet.dat file. According to the Boston federal prosecutor’s office, Vitaliy Antonenko laundered money stolen by hackers using Bitcoin, and Secret Service agents working with him were able to associate Antonenko with two bitcoin wallets through which $ 94 million passed.
On the day of his arrest at Kennedy Airport, in wallets “A” and “B” there were more than 140,000 thousand dollars in “bitcoins”. Wallet “A” worked from November 2013 to July 2017 and through it scammers pumped 575 thousand “bitcoins”, that is, about 23 million dollars. 88% of this amount was transferred from “A” to “B”.
The investigation also found that in October 2012, Antonenko (who was then 20 years old) registered an account with Liberty Reserve, a company engaged in translations. In May 2013, the Ministry of Justice closed this company for involvement in money laundering, but before that, from October 2012 to February 2013, the young and nimble Vitaliy managed to get about $ 15,000 from the account of ValidShop, the online crime forum that traded stolen credit card information. Around the same time, Vitaliy received $ 51,651 from the account of the same forum “ferum511mac”.
According to the prosecution, through an accomplice who runs the case as “Person 1,” Antonenko converted cryptocurrency into dollars at a discount of 9-10%. “Person 1” did not have a license, that is, a right, but transferred dollars to the bank accounts of Vitaly or his mother, and in July 2018 in the California federal court pleaded guilty to illegal transfers and laundered money. On January 14, 2014, he wrote in his diary, which fell into the hands of investigators: “I love that I bought from Vitali all week and he has more! I love that everything went so well. I like to sell 5-10% higher than the rate, buy 9% lower and receive $ 400 or more per day. ”
By and large, only fools keep a diary in such cases, but not for me to judge the mental abilities of "Person 1". In April 2014, he bought 24,999 bitcoins from Antonenko for $ 11,033, and he was smart enough to transfer this amount to Vitaly and his mother’s accounts in portions of 9,900 and 1,133 dollars, that is, less than 10 thousand, which the bank reports to the tax service .
The prosecution also stated that Vitaly Antonenko does not work and lives on the support of his mother, who earns about 40 thousand dollars a year in the Manhattan charitable organization of the Catholic Church. She pays $ 1,256 a month for an apartment at an unspecified address, and Vitalik either did not indicate his income to the tax service at all, or reported that he had earned several thousand dollars in a year. When searching this apartment in Vitaly’s bedroom, federal agents found several laptops, hard drives, flash drives, various usb consoles, and hundreds of CDs and DVDs.
Vitaly's mother told the agents that she was not sure that all this belonged to her son, and not to his friends. According to her, Vitaly spent a lot of time at computers and almost did not work from 2011 until his arrest, and in court she said that she would vouch for her son if he was released on bail, and offered to pay 7.5 thousand dollars for him - three a quarter of the money in her TD bank account.
True, during her cross-examination in court, the prosecutor said that from September 1 to December 31, 2015, Person 1 transferred a total of about 25 thousand dollars to her account. Vitaly Antonenko’s mother was at a loss to explain this and said she was shocked by reports that her Vitalik was a criminal. On the Internet, I came across a message that a man named Vitaliy and Antonenko’s surname studied in Manhattan Communiy Colledge in 2007-2008.
In the database of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, it appears that the 28-year-old policeman Vitaliy Antonenko, No. 91463-053, was released on April 23, 2020, exactly one year after Judge Hennessy decided to detain him. According to the prison coding, the last three digits indicate the federal district in which the arrested person was received, and in this case 053 - the Eastern District of New York State, which includes Brooklyn and Queens. How much Vitaliy Antonenko spent behind the federal bars in New York and where he ended up after being delivered to Boston is not specified in the publicly available documents, but he appeared in the Boston federal court on March 21, 2019.
Two days later, Judge Hennessy, having read the report of the PTS (Pre Trial Services) - Pre-trial Information Service, in his memorandum noted that he doubted Antonenko’s sincerity regarding his flights and drinks. According to the first part, he showed that in February 2019 he flew from New York to Ukraine with an annual visit to his family, and a few years ago he visited the Czech Republic and did not leave the United States again. However, Vitaly’s passport contains stamps confirming several arrivals at Moscow Region’s airports, obviously Sheremetyevsky and Domodedovo.
Similarly, Antonenko testified that he didn’t drink at all, although in New York he was twice detained for driving while intoxicated, for which he was tried once. “During the commission of the crimes brought against him and on the day of his arrest,” wrote Judge David Hennessey, “he was on trial in 2016 and 2017 for transfers he received from Person 1’s sister, and on the day of his arrest (March 2, 2019 ) the Brooklyn Criminal Court heard and adjourned a case in which Vitaliy Antonenko received an “order of protection”, which expired in July 2019. It is not clear whether he was then recognized as an aggressor or a victim of aggression.
To this was added a lot of money, strong ties with foreign countries, which usually hinders release on bail, but, I repeat, a year later Vitaly left the federal prison. A new charge was brought on May 26, and the hearings were scheduled for June 2 with the note that they would not take place “in PM”, but by video link, as required by the conditions of the coronavirus quarantine, which there is little hope of an early cancellation. On May 28, it was clarified that “the date and time of the start of the hearings should be confirmed by the prison administration,” that is, April 25, Antonenko, apparently, moved from one prison to another, not federal.
It was not easy for him, and on June 5, 2019, three months after his arrest at Kennedy Airport, his lawyer Edward Sapone asked Vitaly to undergo a psychiatric examination. The lawyer indicated that his client insists that he works for the CIA, and this seems like a clear sign of insanity to the defense. In his application, Sapone explained that on meetings with him in prison, Vitaliy Antonenko shows signs of “split personality, including excessive paranoia, mystery and the loss of all ties with the family.”
To whom it is, but to me all these qualities seem to be the most necessary for a scout. The response of the examination followed on January 21, 2020 and, apparently, Antonenko was recognized as responsible. The charges against him threaten him with imprisonment for up to 20 years and a fine of up to 500 thousand dollars, but before the court ruling he is considered not guilty.
The fact that he is a nee or naturalized US citizen is not known. Vitaliy Antonenko was arrested on March 2, 2019 at the Kennedy New York International Airport, where he flew from Ukraine via Poland. In New York, federal agents had already been waiting for him and were met by orders of which Vitaly was detained at a checkpoint and found three laptop computers, two of which were without “hard drives”, two mobile phones and various information keepers, including “ flash drive "with a capacity of 4 gigabytes.
The arrest was attended by Sergei Vasiliev, a police detective at Harvard University, who, as stated in court documents, "participated in investigations of financial crimes committed over the Internet, including crimes with cryptocurrency." It is these crimes that Vitaliy Antonenko is accused of, having committed this in “conspiracy to commit computer hacking, selling stolen credit card numbers and money laundering”. The MacIntosh laptop that was seized from Antonenko during the arrest was turned on, and the screen was opened on the website “cvvme-store.su/partner/”. A detective of the Harvard Police Sergey Vasiliev, who was familiar with this site, showed that they sell credit card data, and the word “partner” means that Antonenko works with this site.
The press release of the prosecutor’s office briefly explained that Antonenko and his accomplices had searched the Internet in search of servers available for hacking, which contained “credit and debit card account numbers, their expiration dates, payment card confirmation and other personal data”. At the same time, the defendants and their accomplices used the well-known hacker program, “SQL injection,” which, as the silent interpreter says, “enables the attacker to execute an arbitrary query to the database and to read and / or write local files and execute arbitrary commands on the attacked server ".
When Vitaly’s accomplice was selling stolen data, Antonenko and the others used Bitcoin cryptocurrency along with ordinary bank transfers and laundered money, hiding all their data. Detective Sergei Vasilyev, the court found that the program SQL anything lawful is not engaged and that the seized Vitali flash drive was a file "60k Encrypted" with 60 thousands of credit card data on their number, expiration date, and the names and address of the holder
in the jargon of Russian IT specialists have long been included in the old word "wallet" (in our country - "wallet") - a means of instant money management directly on the Internet. Bitcoin wallet is a way of storing currency of electronic cryptocurrency Bitcoin, an analogue of a bank account that works anonymously, instantly and around the clock.
The key to this wallet is stored in an encrypted password protected wallet.dat file. According to the Boston federal prosecutor’s office, Vitaliy Antonenko laundered money stolen by hackers using Bitcoin, and Secret Service agents working with him were able to associate Antonenko with two bitcoin wallets through which $ 94 million passed.
On the day of his arrest at Kennedy Airport, in wallets “A” and “B” there were more than 140,000 thousand dollars in “bitcoins”. Wallet “A” worked from November 2013 to July 2017 and through it scammers pumped 575 thousand “bitcoins”, that is, about 23 million dollars. 88% of this amount was transferred from “A” to “B”.
The investigation also found that in October 2012, Antonenko (who was then 20 years old) registered an account with Liberty Reserve, a company engaged in translations. In May 2013, the Ministry of Justice closed this company for involvement in money laundering, but before that, from October 2012 to February 2013, the young and nimble Vitaliy managed to get about $ 15,000 from the account of ValidShop, the online crime forum that traded stolen credit card information. Around the same time, Vitaliy received $ 51,651 from the account of the same forum “ferum511mac”.
According to the prosecution, through an accomplice who runs the case as “Person 1,” Antonenko converted cryptocurrency into dollars at a discount of 9-10%. “Person 1” did not have a license, that is, a right, but transferred dollars to the bank accounts of Vitaly or his mother, and in July 2018 in the California federal court pleaded guilty to illegal transfers and laundered money. On January 14, 2014, he wrote in his diary, which fell into the hands of investigators: “I love that I bought from Vitali all week and he has more! I love that everything went so well. I like to sell 5-10% higher than the rate, buy 9% lower and receive $ 400 or more per day. ”
By and large, only fools keep a diary in such cases, but not for me to judge the mental abilities of "Person 1". In April 2014, he bought 24,999 bitcoins from Antonenko for $ 11,033, and he was smart enough to transfer this amount to Vitaly and his mother’s accounts in portions of 9,900 and 1,133 dollars, that is, less than 10 thousand, which the bank reports to the tax service .
The prosecution also stated that Vitaly Antonenko does not work and lives on the support of his mother, who earns about 40 thousand dollars a year in the Manhattan charitable organization of the Catholic Church. She pays $ 1,256 a month for an apartment at an unspecified address, and Vitalik either did not indicate his income to the tax service at all, or reported that he had earned several thousand dollars in a year. When searching this apartment in Vitaly’s bedroom, federal agents found several laptops, hard drives, flash drives, various usb consoles, and hundreds of CDs and DVDs.
Vitaly's mother told the agents that she was not sure that all this belonged to her son, and not to his friends. According to her, Vitaly spent a lot of time at computers and almost did not work from 2011 until his arrest, and in court she said that she would vouch for her son if he was released on bail, and offered to pay 7.5 thousand dollars for him - three a quarter of the money in her TD bank account.
True, during her cross-examination in court, the prosecutor said that from September 1 to December 31, 2015, Person 1 transferred a total of about 25 thousand dollars to her account. Vitaly Antonenko’s mother was at a loss to explain this and said she was shocked by reports that her Vitalik was a criminal. On the Internet, I came across a message that a man named Vitaliy and Antonenko’s surname studied in Manhattan Communiy Colledge in 2007-2008.
In the database of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, it appears that the 28-year-old policeman Vitaliy Antonenko, No. 91463-053, was released on April 23, 2020, exactly one year after Judge Hennessy decided to detain him. According to the prison coding, the last three digits indicate the federal district in which the arrested person was received, and in this case 053 - the Eastern District of New York State, which includes Brooklyn and Queens. How much Vitaliy Antonenko spent behind the federal bars in New York and where he ended up after being delivered to Boston is not specified in the publicly available documents, but he appeared in the Boston federal court on March 21, 2019.
Two days later, Judge Hennessy, having read the report of the PTS (Pre Trial Services) - Pre-trial Information Service, in his memorandum noted that he doubted Antonenko’s sincerity regarding his flights and drinks. According to the first part, he showed that in February 2019 he flew from New York to Ukraine with an annual visit to his family, and a few years ago he visited the Czech Republic and did not leave the United States again. However, Vitaly’s passport contains stamps confirming several arrivals at Moscow Region’s airports, obviously Sheremetyevsky and Domodedovo.
Similarly, Antonenko testified that he didn’t drink at all, although in New York he was twice detained for driving while intoxicated, for which he was tried once. “During the commission of the crimes brought against him and on the day of his arrest,” wrote Judge David Hennessey, “he was on trial in 2016 and 2017 for transfers he received from Person 1’s sister, and on the day of his arrest (March 2, 2019 ) the Brooklyn Criminal Court heard and adjourned a case in which Vitaliy Antonenko received an “order of protection”, which expired in July 2019. It is not clear whether he was then recognized as an aggressor or a victim of aggression.
To this was added a lot of money, strong ties with foreign countries, which usually hinders release on bail, but, I repeat, a year later Vitaly left the federal prison. A new charge was brought on May 26, and the hearings were scheduled for June 2 with the note that they would not take place “in PM”, but by video link, as required by the conditions of the coronavirus quarantine, which there is little hope of an early cancellation. On May 28, it was clarified that “the date and time of the start of the hearings should be confirmed by the prison administration,” that is, April 25, Antonenko, apparently, moved from one prison to another, not federal.
It was not easy for him, and on June 5, 2019, three months after his arrest at Kennedy Airport, his lawyer Edward Sapone asked Vitaly to undergo a psychiatric examination. The lawyer indicated that his client insists that he works for the CIA, and this seems like a clear sign of insanity to the defense. In his application, Sapone explained that on meetings with him in prison, Vitaliy Antonenko shows signs of “split personality, including excessive paranoia, mystery and the loss of all ties with the family.”
To whom it is, but to me all these qualities seem to be the most necessary for a scout. The response of the examination followed on January 21, 2020 and, apparently, Antonenko was recognized as responsible. The charges against him threaten him with imprisonment for up to 20 years and a fine of up to 500 thousand dollars, but before the court ruling he is considered not guilty.