14 DAY TRIAL // French authorities arrested notorious credit card trafficker Vladislav Anatolievich Horohorin, one of the CarderPlanet founders last Saturday and plan to extradite him to the United States.
Police caught up with Horohorin, 27, in Nice, as he was preparing to embark on a flight bound to Moscow, where he currently resides.
The alleged identity thief was taken into custody on an international arrest warrant based on charges pending against him in US.
According to an indictment dating from November 2009 and unsealed yesterday, Horohorin sold huge "dumps" of stolen credit card data to fraudsters around the world.
Known online as "BadB", he advertised the "merchandise" through criminal forums like CarderPlanet and carder.su and delivered it via a self-made dump sharing service hosted at dump.name.
"The network created by the founders of CarderPlanet, including Vladislav Horohorin, remains one of the most sophisticated organizations of online financial criminals in the world," said U.S. Secret Service Assistant Director for Investigations Michael Merritt.
"This network has been repeatedly linked to nearly every major intrusion of financial information reported to the international law enforcement community," he also noted.
Even though he lives in Moscow, Horohorin has Ukrainian and Israeli citizenship. Had he been Russian, extradition would not have been possible since the country's constitution bans the practice.
Horohorin will face a sentence of ten years in prison and a $250,000 fine on one count of access device fraud and another two years and $250,000 fine on a charge of aggravated identify theft.
"Cyber criminals who target U.S citizens should not fool themselves into believing they can elude justice simply because they commit crimes outside of our borders," said Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Criminal Division.
"As this and so many other cases demonstrate, working hand in hand with our partners around the globe, we will do everything in our power to bring these criminals to the United States to answer for their alleged crimes," he added.
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