Russian lawmaker's son gets 27 years prison in U.S. hacking case




Reuters April 21, 2017
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(Reuters) - The son of a Russian lawmaker was sentenced on Friday by a U.S. federal court to 27 years in prison after being convicted of hacking into U.S. small businesses and financial institutions, causing more than $169 million in damages.

Roman Seleznev was found guilty last year by a jury in Seattle on 38 counts in a scheme that prosecutors said involved hacking into point-of-sale computers to steal credit card numbers and sell them on the Internet.

Seleznev is the son of Valery Seleznev, a member of the Russian parliament, and Russia called his arrest in the Maldives in 2014 a "kidnapping."

Seleznev, 32, was sentenced by Judge Richard A. Jones of the Western District of Washington. His conviction followed a decade-long investigation by the U.S. Secret Service, the Department of Justice said in a press release.

Prosecutors said that from October 2009 to October 2013 Seleznev stole credit card numbers from more than 500 U.S. businesses, transferred the data to servers in Virginia, Russia and the Ukraine and eventually sold the information on criminal "carding" websites.

Seleznev faces separate charges pending in federal courts in Nevada and Georgia.

His lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A federal grand jury in Connecticut returned an eight-count indictment charging a Russian national who was arrested earlier this month with operating the Kelihos botnet, a global network of tens of thousands of infected computers, the U.S. Justice Department said on Friday.

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