14 DAY TRIAL // Peter Romar, also known as Pierre Romar, a 36-year-old Syrian living in Germany was extradited to the US and appeared in front of a US judge in the Eastern District of Virginia today.
Back in March 2016, US officials unsealed charges against three men they accused of being part of the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) hacking crew.
Authorities charged Ahmad Umar Agha, 22, from Syria, known as "Th3 Pro"; Firas Dardar, 27, living in Homs, Syria, known as "The Shadow"; and Peter Romar, 36, living in Waltershausen, Germany.
Romar was an intermediary for money transfers
While the first two, Agha and Dardar, were the group's actual hackers, Romar's role in the entire operation was to serve as an intermediary for financial transactions.
US officials said Romar worked together with Dardar as part of an online extortion scheme. Dardar would get in contact with various US and international businesses, and leveraging his reputation as an SEA member, would threaten companies with carrying out DDoS attacks, breaching their servers, or even releasing data from breached servers unless they didn't pay a certain sum of money.
If the victim were a company from the US, then most likely, it wouldn't be able to transfer funds directly to a Syrian bank account, due to the US' Syrian Sanctions Regulations.
Dardar would then instruct these companies to send the money to a bank account under Romar's control, who would then relay the money back to Dardar.
German authorities arrested and extradited Romar
Knowing of his whereabouts, US authorities issued a provisional arrest warrant in Romar's name, prior to unsealing official charges on March 22. German police apprehended Romar, and he was extradited two months later.
In a separate report, The Washington Post revealed today that Dardar and Romar blackmailed at least fourteen companies in the US and Europe, usually requesting a ransom of about $15,000 per victim on average.
Dardar and Agha, the other two SEA members indicted by US authorities are still at large. Both individuals are on the FBI's most wanted cyber-criminals list, and the FBI will pay $100,000 (€90,000) for any information that leads to their arrest.