Belarusian sentenced to US prison for assisting identity theft scams

Dmitry Naskovets has been sentenced to 33 months in federal prison for operating CallService.biz
Dmitry Naskovets has been sentenced to 33 months in federal prison for operating CallService.biz

CallService.biz was a Russian-language website that provided English- and German-speaking individuals to criminals who had stolen credit card and bank account information. The individuals would pose as the account holders and place calls to financial institutions and other businesses to confirm fraudulent withdrawals, transactions, or other account activity on behalf of the identity thieves, explained a statement from the Office of the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Naskovets was arrested in the Czech Republic in April 2010 as part of a multinational law enforcement operation and was subsequently extradited to the US, where he pled guilty in February 2011. His alleged accomplice, Sergey Semashko, was arrested in Belarus, and Lithuanian law enforcement seized their computers.

“Through his website, Dimitry Naskovets served as the middleman for a network of identity thieves who used his many employees to impersonate thousands of victims in exchange for a stake in the profits from the fraudulent transactions they helped facilitate. This case is another example of how cybercrime knows no geographic boundaries and of how we will work with our partners in the United States and around the world to catch and punish cyber criminals”, commented Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara.

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