Three guilty of identity fraud which netted millions

Begin forwarded message:

From: Brian Randell <[email protected]>
Date: December 1, 2006 10:36:58 AM EST
To: [email protected]
Subject: Three guilty of identity fraud which netted millions

Hi Dave:

This is in today's (UK) Guardian, at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,1961441,00.html

Cheers

Brian

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Three guilty of identity fraud which netted millions

David Pallister
Friday December 1, 2006
The Guardian

On the eve of "Black Thursday", the Russian banks' liquidity crisis  
of August 1995, Anton Dolgov, the head of the Moskovsky Gorodskoi  
Bank, disappeared leaving debts of around $100m.

Yesterday, after hiding behind dozens of aliases, Dolgov stood in the  
dock of a London court as the head of an international identity theft  
gang that had defrauded thousands of account holders out of millions  
of pounds.

Police believe the internet-based enterprise, which operated from  
Notting Hill, west London, ran undetected for 10 years. Huge numbers  
of compromised credit cards were used to buy electrical goods, later  
sold to customers on eBay, and to gamble on sporting fixtures.
A library of false documents and a bogus firm of solicitors were used  
to generate fictitious identities and open hundreds of bank accounts  
to hold the huge amounts of illicit cash flooding in.

Dolgov, who pleaded guilty at Harrow crown court to four conspiracy  
charges under one of his false names, Anton Gelonkin, was caught  
after his headquarters stuffed with state-of-the-art computers and  
encryption software - was broken into. The police were called.  
Nothing had been stolen but they made a note of his name - Gelonkin.

Weeks earlier, police had raided the Spanish end of his operation.  
The raid resulted in an international warrant for Anthony Peyton -  
alias Gelonkin. The Interpol notice was picked up in London and the  
serious and organised crime organisation launched Operation Tertiary.

In January last year Dolgov's offices were raided, but the haul would  
almost certainly have been much greater had not one of the gang's  
members, Estonian Aleksei Kostap, thrown a power switch which blanked  
out the bank of computers on which the operation relied and triggered  
layers of encryption.

Despite the evidence against him, including false passports bearing  
his photograph, Kostap, 31, insisted he had been framed. But after an  
18-day trial he was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud and  
perverting the course of justice. He, Dolgov and a Lithuanian,  
Romanos Vasilauskas, 24, who pleaded guilty to possessing three false  
passports with intent, will be sentenced on December 13.

David Hewett, prosecuting, told the court Gelonkin was the "general  
manager", while a shadowy figure called Kaljussar was thought to be  
the mastermind. Their scheme was based on huge numbers of false  
identities and compromised credit cards in the UK, US and Spain and  
several other European countries.


-- 
School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE1 7RU, UK
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