US court finds son of Russian Duma Deputy guilty of hacking
A jury in the US city of Seattle found Russian citizen Roman Seleznev, the son of Valery Seleznev, a State Duma deputy from the Liberal Democratic Party, guilty of cyber fraud. He was accused of stealing more than a million credit card numbers and reselling them on the black market, the Seattle Times wrote on Thursday, August 25.
The jury found Seleznev guilty of 38 of the 40 charges, including fraud using electronic means of communication, bank fraud, hacking of computer systems and theft of personal data. According to the indictment, the hacker’s actions caused about $170 million worth of damage to credit card companies. The sentence for Seleznev will be announced later.
Seleznev’s defense during the court hearings, which lasted a week and a half, tried to convince the court that federal agents obtained access to the defendant’s laptop without a warrant and could have manipulated the data. There were 1.7 million credit cards numbers found in the laptop’s memory.
Earlier, the prosecution claimed that for seven years Roman Seleznev was one of the world’s largest dealers in stolen credit card numbers. In turn, the defendant’s father claimed his son’s arrest was a kidnapping and declared that he possesses only limited computer skills and suffers from an injury that he received as a result of the explosion during a terrorist attack in Morocco in 2011. However, from the beginning the US Justice Department blamed Seleznev for the theft of personal data in the United States between 2009 and 2011.
Roman Seleznev was arrested in the Maldives on July 5, 2014. At that time, the Russian Foreign Ministry protested his detention and called for his release.