14 DAY TRIAL // A 26-year-old Belarusian pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and credit card fraud in relation to his role in an operation that assisted identity thieves to defraud banks.
Dmitry M. Naskovets admitted co-founding and running CallService.biz, a website that helped fraudsters bypass the security screening processes implemented by banks.
CallService.biz employed English- and German-speaking people to impersonate account holders in telephone calls with bank employees in order to authorize fraudulent transactions.
These service was offered for a fee to identity thieves and was aggressively promoted on other criminal websites.
One of the other underground websites that advertised it was CardingWorld.cc, a forum operated by CallService.biz co-founder Sergey Semasko.
The ads boasted that CallService had over 2,000 customers and successfully completed over 5,400 confirmation calls.
Naskovets was arrested on April 15, 2010, in the Czech Republic and was later extradited to the United States. At a same time, Semasko was arrested in Belarus and will stand trial there.
In a joint effort, Lithuanian authorities seized the servers used by the website, while the FBI took ownership of the domain name itself.
Dmitry Naskovets faces a maximum prison sentence of 37.5 years for the charges he admitted to. He will be sentenced on May 26.
"Dmitry Naskovets thought he could hide in the dark recesses of the Internet, assisting thousands of thieves in defrauding American banks and other institutions, but he was mistaken," commented Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.
"This case was a model of international cooperation, and serves as a warning to anyone who thinks they can hide behind the anonymity of the Internet and outside the United States to commit fraud. With our partners at the FBI and our law enforcement colleagues around the world, this Office will pursue identity thieves and their co-conspirators wherever they may hide," he added.