Russian Hacker Sentenced to 27 Years in Credit Card Scheme, father incensed

A member of Russian Parliament is outraged after his son was handed down a sentence of 27 years in prison for computer hacking crimes in the US.

Roman Valeryevich Seleznev, 32, was convicted in August for stealing credit card data from US restaurants, causing nearly $170m (£132m) in damages.

Russian MP Valery Seleznev said the sentence was “passed by man-eaters” and that his son was “abducted”.

Seleznev made millions by selling the data on the dark web, US officials say.

“It’s a sentence passed by man-eaters…My son was abducted,” Mr Seleznevtold RIA Novosti news agency.

Mr Seleznev, a member of the lower house of the Russian legislature known as the Duma, is an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the New York Times reports.

“My son was tortured because being in jail in a foreign country after abduction is torture in itself. He is innocent,” he continued.

Mr Seleznev, a member of the the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR), added that he viewed the sentence as a life sentence because his son would never survive 27 years in prison.

Between 2009 and 2013, Seleznev hacked into retail point-of-sale systems and installed malicious software that enabled him to steal millions of credit card numbers from more than 500 American businesses and 3,700 financial institutions, according to the Justice Department.

He then sent the data to servers he controlled in Russia, the Ukraine and McLean, Virginia, and sold the information on criminal “carding” websites, where users bought them for fraudulent purchases, officials said.

Seleznev was taken into custody in July 2014 in the Maldives and his laptop at the time contained more than 1.7m stolen credit card numbers.

Evidence showed he earned tens of millions of dollars from the scheme.

Many of the businesses he targeted were small businesses, including Broadway Grill in Seattle, which was forced into bankruptcy following the cyber attack.

“Today is a bad day for hackers around the world,” said US Attorney Annette L Hayes. “The notion that the internet is a Wild West where anything goes is a thing of the past.

“Whether the victims are multi-national banks or small pizza joints, we are all victims when our day-to-day transactions result in millions of dollars ending up in the wrong hands.”

Source – New York Times reports.