14 DAY TRIAL // The FBI is currently trying to bring to justice about 123 people accused of cyber crimes, hoping they'll be put to trial in the United States.
Steven Kelly, unit chief of the International cybercrime coordination cell, spoke at the RSA Conference, IT News reports. According to his statement during the event, the number is sourced from a recent fugitive apprehension initiative seeking to understand who all of the charged individuals in cyber crime cases are across the FBI.
"I think it's a massive number. It's a lot of people that have not been brought to justice because they are all over the world; they're in a place where we don't have an extradition treaty, and that's a problem," Kelly said.
The FBI unit chief, alongside representatives from the European Cybercrime Centre and the US Department of Justice, took the opportunity to express their concerns about the large number of cyber criminals on the loose. "We're not going to build a deterrence model for cyber crime if we can't get our hands on these people," Kelly pointed out.
According to him, spending two years making a case, bringing it to a grand jury and getting charges is not going to do much if they can't actually get the people responsible and other criminals will continue acting just as before, with impunity and from safe havens where the FBI can't reach them.
Extradition limitations
Another issue seems to be the fact that most extradition treaties were not written with cyber crime in mind and are often limited to what they cover. John Lynch, chief of the computer crime and intellectual property department in the DoJ's criminal division explains that many countries have restrictions about extraditing their own citizens and could, instead, be asked to pursue charges against them in their land.
In these circumstances, the prosecutors need to hand over their case files to the authorities in the country that can't extradite an individual and hope for the best.
Lynch notes that, in the past several years, the United States has established a sanctions regime addressing cyber criminals. "At the end of last year we actually implemented against a couple of actors who had been charged in the United States with running a ransomware scheme and botnet and another that was involved in some major data breaches," he said. While they didn't end up behind bars in the United States, there's pressure on them, making it difficult for them to travel or obtain some of the profits from their activities.