Identity Theft News

Man pleads guilty in brokerage account hacking scheme

Monday, June 8, 2009

Alexey Mineev, 23, has pleaded guilty to charges of money laundering in connection with a scheme to steal funds from hacked brokerage accounts.

Prosecutors said Mineev would receive fund transfers from hacked accounts in bank "drop accounts" he had set up. He would then wire the funds to co-conspirators in Russia using remittance services.

The scheme involved infecting brokers' PCs with Trojan horse software that would steal account numbers and passwords from the brokers when they logged in over the internet.

Alexander Bobnev, a co-conspirator in the identity theft fraud, allegedly used the stolen passwords to access accounts to sell securities and then transfer funds to drop accounts set up by Mineev. Mineev would then wire the stolen funds to Russia.

Bobnev is believed to be in Russia and out of reach of U.S. law enforcement, according to IDG News Service.

Investigators used an unnamed informant to catch Bobnev and another man charged in the scheme, Aleksey Volynskiy, in the act. The informant set up an account under investigators' control to which Bobnev wired funds stolen from two Charles Schwab brokerage accounts in July 2007.

Mineev agreed in his plea arrangement to return $112,000 he made as part of the fraud, IDG News reported.