Three years ago, in February 2020, law enforcement agencies reported with fanfare to the media about the simultaneous detention of 26 people in different regions of the country. They loudly announced the disclosure of the carder criminal community. 24 people were taken into custody.
Three years have passed… 8 people were released by the Moscow City Court, 16 people continue to be held in pre-trial detention center. The investigation lasted 11 months; it took 25 months to get acquainted with the volumes of the criminal case.
For three years now, the third department of the Investigation Department of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs has been trying to complete this case and send it to court. In November 2022, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office refused to sign the indictment.
The investigator and operatives who were at the origins of the case resigned. The case has reached a dead end, but this does not prevent dozens of people from extending their detention under economic Article 187 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.
The indictment indicated that Flint’s group controlled most of the shadow market for payment instruments. Despite such a loud phrase, the indictment refers to the turnover of bank cards for only $700. They stated that the group had been operating since 2014, but indicated only the purchases carried out by operatives at the end of 2019. In the five years between these dates, it was not possible to find and impute anything.
Investigators did not write which shadow market was controlled, probably a foreign market, since access to the sites was provided only to foreign citizens from foreign IP addresses. Even website technical support worked in English. Access within Russia was blocked. Law enforcement officials claim that bank cards of American banks were compromised.
For none of the alleged bank cards mentioned in the indictment, it was never established whether it was actually issued by one or another foreign bank. No requests were sent to the United States in 2020 and 2021, and now in 2022 and 2023 this has apparently become impossible.
This does not prevent us from continuing to hold in custody for almost 36 months 16 people, from whom, in order to achieve not appearance, but a real preliminary investigation and house arrest, there was nothing left but a hunger strike.
The leader of the group, Stroganov (Flint), during his activities, was awarded a certificate from the director of the FSB of the Russian Federation for ensuring cybersecurity of the Russian Federation and gratitude from Vladimir Putin for ensuring cybersecurity during the FIFA World Cup in the Russian Federation in 2018.
“ВЧК ОГПУ”
