A 30-year-old Russian national named Aleksey Yurievich Burkov was sentenced today to nine years in prison for operating Cardplanet and Direct Connection, two websites/forums that facilitated payment card fraud, hacking, and other cybercrimes.
Burkov (also known as Aleksey Yurevich Burkov) pleaded guilty to the following crimes: identity theft, computer hacking, wire fraud, money laundering , and conspiracy to commit device access fraud in January 2020, facing a sentence of 15 years in prison.
He was arrested at Ben-Gurion Airport in December 2015 and extradited to the United States in November 2019.
Since his sentence also includes time he has already served, Burkov will not have to spend nine years in prison.
150,000 stolen cards sold
The Cardplanet website controlled by the defendant from at least early 2009 until at least August 2013 was a card shop (also known as a card and CVV shop) where it oversaw the sale of credit card numbers stolen from hundreds of thousands of people.
The Cardplanet website was used to sell data from more than 150,000 stolen cards according to the indictment, and this criminal activity resulted in estimated fraud losses and fraudulent purchases of more than $20,000,000.
Burkov also advertised his Cardplanet website on other card forums as the only service that refunds money paid for invalid data via Liberty Reserve, WebMoney, Western Union, or MoneyGram.
Some of the customers who purchased stolen card data from Cardplanet later encoded it into counterfeit cards and used them to pay for services and goods throughout the United States and elsewhere.
Forum for cybercrimes where you become a member only by invitation
Burkov was also the owner and operator of a cybercrime forum, an invitation-only club for elite cybercriminals who used it to advertise stolen goods, such as stolen personally identifiable information (PII), malware, and criminal services such as hacking.
Those who wanted to become members of the Direct Connection forum had to have “three existing members to ‘guarantee’ their good reputation among cybercriminals and provide a sum of money, usually $5,000, as security.”
These extreme membership requirements were designed to prevent law enforcement officials from gaining access to the forum, as well as to ensure that members honored the agreements they made when conducting business on the Direct Connection forum.
