When Schrooten arrived in the country, US Attorney Jenny A. Durkan famously said, “People think that cyber criminals cannot be found or apprehended. Today we know that’s not true. You cannot hide in cyberspace. We will find you. We will charge you. We will extradite you and we will prosecute you.” That prosecution is pending. Schroebel, however, admitted guilt and has now been sentenced to seven years in prison.
The charge is that the two partnered in the theft of thousands of bank card details in and around Seattle. It came to light when customers of an Italian restaurant complained to the owner that unexpected charges were appearing on their bank accounts, and that they suspected that restaurant staff were stealing the card details. This turned out to be false. A subsequent police investigation led to Schroebel who they accused of planting spyware on the computers of at least two Seattle businesses. The spyware connected card details and forwarded them to a server in Kansas controlled by Schroebel. He collected around 5000 card details during 2011.
Schrooten comes into the story as the operator of Kurupt.su, an English language carding site, with which Schroebel had contact and used to sell the card details. Brian Krebs tells the story of his online encounter with Schrooten, who appears to have had designs on taking over the carding world. Possibly as part of this, he stole stolen card details from the similarly named Russian Korupt.ru carding site. But the Russian site hit back by releasing what they believed to be his real name. Right or wrong, it seems to from this time that the US authorities started to close in.
Security consultant Dan Clements tried to find out what the US authorities (and Interpol) knew about Korupt.su, and issued FoI requests on DHS, FBI, DoJ and Interpol. DHS replied that it is very busy, but will let him know when they can. The FBI, DoJ and Interpol all say they have no records on Korupt.su.
Schrooten was arrested by Interpol and Romanian authorities when he arrived in Romania in March 2012. He is reported to have twice attempted suicide while being held in Romania, and raised no objection to his extradition. His US trial is set for February 2013.