Vrublevsky blue moon

Vrublevsky

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Vrublevsky

Pavel Olegovich Vrublevsky (Russian: Павел Олегович Врублевский; born 26 December 1978) is a Russian, owner and general manager of the processing company ChronoPay. He is also the founder of investment company RNP^[1] and a Russian Forbes contributor on matters relating to blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and cybersecurity. He was also implicated in a range of criminal cases related to hacking.^[2]

Youth and education

Pavel Vrublevsky was born and raised in Moscow. As a fifteen-year-old, he studied under the American Field Service student exchange program in Norway, then studied at the Institute of Foreign Languages named after Maurice Thorez, from where he moved to the sociology department of Moscow State University and graduated in 2001.^[3] He organized his first IT company to develop billing software for telecommunications companies at the age of eighteen.^[4]

Career

ChronoPay

Main article: ChronoPay

In 2003, at age 23, he founded the company ChronoPay B.V.^[5] In 2005, ChronoPay entered the Russian market, and in 2006 Vrublevsky received the prestigious Runet Award.^[6][7][8] Within three years, the company gained international recognition as one of the premier processing companies at the cutting edge of technology. Even though ChronoPay was headquartered in Amsterdam, the company developed into a true leader for processing credit card payments in Russia – controlling roughly 25% of the market share. The company’s client roster boasted several Russian companies as well as larger multinational corporations including Sony and Microsoft. Most Russian charitable foundations and non-profit organizations also use ChronoPay, including Greenpeace and the Red Cross. Additional clients included Russia’s second largest airline, Transaero, and the country’s largest cellphone operator, MTS. In 2011 ChronoPay had five worldwide offices; Moscow, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Florida in the United States, and Riga, Latvia. There were two franchises in China and an active business in Brazil. In 2011, the company had more than two hundred employees.

ChronoPay's impact

ChronoPay's impact on the online card processing payment industry in Russia is undeniable. In fact, even today, most of Russia’s internet-based payments marketplace entirely relies on former ChronoPay personnel, to name just a few: Largest Russian Bank - Sberbank,^[9] most popular e-money system in Russia - Yandex.Money,^[10] card associations, such as Mastercard and many more. Dozens of important state banks and other payment providers are all dependent on former ChronoPay employees, not unlike McKinsey & Company’s impact on management consulting. According to Russian Forbes, today as 2016 ChronoPay serves up to 25% of the wealthiest corporations concerning capitalization web companies in Russia, including two of four Russian cell companies; MTS and Tele2.

MP3search

Main article: Copyright law of Russia

In 2006, Vrublevsky led the e-commerce commission of the NAUET.^[11] The Commission advocated for the preservation of the existing model for the collective management of copyright on the Internet. Vrublevsky was a vocal proponent of one of the largest rights management societies at the time - FAIR.^[12]

In 2007, together with good friend and the former producer of the T.A.T.U. group, Ivan Shapovalov, Vrublevsky purchased a mp3search.ru online store, and was actively engaged in his own mp3 business.^[13] T.A.T.U. is the only music group from Russia whose music was chosen as the official Russian soundtrack for the 2014 Olympics. Shapovalov remained a business partner of Vrublevsky’s wife, Vera Vrublevskaya, a Russian producer. for a long time running a social network for musicians along with her.

Vrublevsky's Chronopay was serving^[14] the infamous online store allofmp3.com, which was persecuted by the international society for collective management of copyrights IFPI^[15] and was accused of infringing by the US during the negotiations on Russia's accession to the WTO.^[16][17][18]

Allofmp3.com worked under the license of ROMS and gave this organization about 50% of license fees.^[14][19]

Electronic tickets

In 2007, after the appearance of electronic air tickets in Russia, Vrublevsky engaged in processing in this area, organizing the project E-Avia.^[20][21] ChronoPay E-Avia, processing payments for most major airlines (the largest of the clients is Transaero), with the exception of Aeroflot.^[22]

In 2010, Vrublevsky proposed to create a national air ticket reservation system (GDS) based on E-Avia.^[23] He is ready to transfer a controlling stake in this structure to Aeroflot. The proposal did not find any response. As a result, a single Russian GDS was never created. After the entry into force of the law on the storage of personal data of Russians in the territory of the Russian Federation, the state-owned company "RosTech" was urgently called upon to create a national GDS (where Russian airline tickets will be kept).^[24][25][26]

Working group with the Ministry of Communications for combating spam

In 2009, Pavel Vrublevsky, part of the working group on combating spam under the Ministry of Communications,^[27] initiated a campaign against his former partner Igor Gusev (according to Spamhaus rating of the world's main spammer^[28]), the owner of the largest partner spam network for sale Viagra Glavmed.^[29]

Experts agree that after the commencement of the criminal prosecution of Gusev and the closure of Spamit's spam in 2010, the global level of spam fell by half.^[30]

The financial newspaper

In 2012, Vrublevsky proposed the redemption of the magazine "Hacker" from the publishing house GAMELAND.^[31] Also, according to media reports,^[32][33] in 2012 Vrublevsky is preparing a deal to buy the oldest business publication in the country - the Financial Newspaper (1915), published jointly with the RF Ministry of Finance.^[34]

Vrublevsky also provided the financial backing to relaunch the Finansovaya Gazette (Financial newspaper), Russia’s oldest financial newspaper, initially run by the Ministry of Finance of Russia which was founded in 1914. The iconic publication published several influential voices throughout history including Vladimir Lenin. Two of Russia’s most well-respected financial journalists, Nikolai Vardul and Raf Shakirov, worked with Vrublevsky and took the editorial reigns of the publication during its comeback. Previously, Vardul and Shakirov were the chief editors of Kommersant, Russia’s most known business newspaper. Vrublevsky and ChronoPay’s commitment to the paper's survival went as far as housing the paper for a time especially during past economic hardships when the whole newspaper resided in the ChronoPay office.

Advocacy for National Payment System and National Booking System

Vrublesky advocated for the creation of a National Payment System long before it was hastily created as a reaction to sanctions. Vrublevsky was so outspoken in his advocacy that some foreign journalists (Brian Krebs and Business Insider) falsely predicted that he would run the system in exchange for being cleared of false allegations.

The National Booking System was also something that he pushed for and was eventually created by the Russian corporation, Rostechnology.^[35]

A Change in Opinion Leads to Support for Blockchain and Bitcoin

Weeks before the Kremlin publicly embraced Blockchain and Bitcoin, Pavel strongly advocated and trumpeted the cutting-edge technology eventually becoming Russian Forbes contributor on the ground-breaking development. Initially, Vrublevsky was very unsure on public of the new industry but eventually migrated to become one of its loudest supporters.^[36]

Confrontation with the Center of Information Security of the Russian Federal Security Service and rehabilitation

Main article: Mikhailov case

In 2007, Pavel Vrublevsky first came under the pressure of the Central of Information Security of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation,^[37][38] in 2010 he accused the CIS of the FSB of Russia of treason and the promotion of the myth of the Russian cyber threat, and in 2011 was arrested several times by officers of the FSB investigating a cyberattack on Aeroflot's online payment system.^[39]

He was convicted of orchestrating the cyberattack and sentenced to 2.5 years in prison in 2013, but was granted early parole after serving less than a year of incarceration.^[40] In 2016, on the basis of materials from Vrublevsky, officers of the CIS FSB were arrested^[41][42] because of high treason,^[43][44][45] which led to the termination of cooperation between the US and Russia on cybercrime. In 2018 the court sentenced Colonel Mikhailov of CIS FSB to 22 years in prison, his accomplice from Kaspersky Lab Ruslan Stoyanov to 14 years in prison, Mikhailov’s subordinate mr. Dokuchaev to 6 years in prison and their accomplice Mr. Fomchenkov to 7 years in prison. Mr.Dokuchaev is separately wanted by FBI USA for alleged cyber attacks on Yahoo and illicit pharmaceutical trade.^[46]

Media attacks and criticism

Vrublevsky was extensively targeted by American journalist Brian Krebs - in fact not only did Krebs focus on Vrublevsky for a story, he wrote close to twenty-five stories about him.

Krebs has enjoyed tremendous support with both the Russian FSB as well as written positive stories of Kaspersky Labs - the major partner of the United States & Krebs in the scandal. The United States has since terminated any and all contracts with Kaspersky.

According to Krebs there was an internal war of corruption between Pavel and the troubled man he was attempted to mentor, Igor Gusev. While Pavel had taken him down years earlier at the request of Russian police for being the world’s top spammer, he was now running one of the top spam affiliate programs in the world selling fake Viagra. Gusev became Krebs' primary source against Pavel, while Gusev, now exiled from Russia, was looking to settle a score against Pavel by setting him up. The revelations were entirely based on Gusev's statements and ChronoPay's stolen and hacked databases. Vrublevsky published his own research into the origins of the investigations into Brian Krebs as well as into that of another known cyber security researcher, Kimberly Zenz, accusing them both of working on behalf of American intelligence agencies.^[47] Vrublevsky humorously compared Krebs and Zenz with alleged Russian spies Boshirov and Petrov.^[48][49][50]

Eventually, Vrublevsky was the central villain in Krebs' New York Times best-selling book, Spam Nation. However, recent events (arrests of Mikhailov’s group and subsequent charges against Dokuchaev by the FBI in the United States) debunk Kreb’s narrative about Vrublevsky’s role.

For instance New York Times noted that the arrests of Mikhailov’s FSB group «amounted to a purge of the leadership of the cyberwing of Russia’s main intelligence agency in the midst of the electoral hacking scandal, an issue carrying immense implications for Russia’s relations with the United States.» In an interview to New York Times Vrublevsky stated «“These guys were selling fairy tales to the United States about people doing business, like me.”

In an interview to CNN Vrublevsky added «"I believe it's a good thing for both countries [Russia and US]. These people are directly responsible for the cyber hysteria eventually going as far as election meddling scandal. I am very happy it's over."^[51][52]

Column in Forbes, statements on Russian hackers

Since November, 2016 he has been leading a column in Forbes about electronic payments and crypto-currencies, in particular, the popularization of bitcoin.^[53] Vrublevsky’s statements on Russian hackers received wide response. In the spring and summer of 2017, Vrublevsky conveyed to a number of leading world media materials testifying to the non-involvement of Russian hackers in attacks on the servers of the Democratic Party in the United States.^[54][55]

Other organizations

In different years he headed:

The Anti-Spam Commission under the Internet Development Working Group under the Ministry of Communications of the Russian Federation.^[56]
Committee on e-commerce under the National Association of Electronic Commerce Participants.^[57]
Member of RAEK.^[58]

In 2011, the magazine "Finance" included in the prestigious "33 Pepper" rating - the most successful men under the age of 33.^[4]

In 2011 Vrublevsky was also the major sponsor of VTB League, paying over one million USD to Russia’s main basketball league. He was frequently seen along with VTB League top management including mr. Sergei Ivanov, one of Russia’s most influential politicians.^[59]

In 2018 Vrublevsky heads the Payments Committee of IDACB.com, one of world’s largest Bitcoin associations, founded by 65 member states ultra high- rank representatives. Russian office of IDACB was founded with the assistance of Mr. Herman Klimenko, an Advisor on the Internet to President of Russia Mr. Putin, who frequently appears alongside Vrublevsky in their Facebook pages photos

Personal life

He is married to Vera Vrublevsky, the mother of his three children.^{[60][61][62][63]}

wapo no lnx

Analysis

The FBI just indicted a Russian official for hacking. But why did Russia charge him with treason?

Andrew Roth

March 16, 2017

MOSCOW — As my colleague Ellen Nakashima wrote yesterday, the FBI announced bombshell indictments against two Russian spies and two hackers over the 2014 heist of 500 million Yahoo user accounts, “marking the first U.S. criminal cyber charges ever against Russian government officials.” The charges, if true, are some of the first to give detailed evidence of how Russian intelligence agencies use cybercriminals as “hackers-for-hire.”

But what is less clear is why one of the men has been arrested and charged with treason in Russia. Dmitry Dokuchaev, an agent for the cyberinvestigative arm of the FSB, was arrested in Moscow in December. He's accused by the FBI of “handling” the hackers, paying “bounties” for breaking into email accounts held by Russian officials, opposition politicians and journalists, as well as foreign officials and business executives. The Russian targets included an Interior Ministry officer and physical trainer in a regional Ministry of Sports. (The full text of the indictment, which has a full list of the targets and some curious typos, is here.)

Reading this hackers indictment. I'm pretty sure there is no such position as the "deputy chairman of the Russian Federation" pic.twitter.com/DOWXYNoWjZ

— Shaun Walker (@shaunwalker7) March 15, 2017

Dokuchaev's case is part of a larger and mysterious spate of arrests of Russian cyber officials and experts. His superior, Sergei Mikhailov, deputy chief of the FSB's Center for Information Security,was also arrested in December and charged with treason. According to Russian reports, the arrest came during a plenum of FSB officers, where Mikhailov had a bag placed over his head and was taken in handcuffs from the room. Ruslan Stoyanov, a manager at the Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab, was also arrested that month. Stoyanov helped coordinate investigations between the company and law enforcement, a person who used to work at the company said.

Below are some of the theories behind the Russian arrests. Lawyers for some of the accused have told The Washington Post that they can't reveal details of the case and, because of the secrecy afforded to treason cases, they don't have access to all the documents.

None of the theories below has been confirmed, nor are they mutually exclusive.

1. Links to U.S. election hacking: With attention focused on the hacking attacks against the U.S. Democratic National Committee allegedly ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin, some Russian and U.S. media suggested that Dokuchaev and Mikhailov leaked information implicating Russia in the hack to the United States. The Russian Interfax news agency, which regularly cites government officials as sources, reported that “Sergei Mikhailov and his deputy, Dmitry Dokuchaev, are accused of betraying their oath and working with the CIA.” Novaya Gazeta, a liberal, respected Russian publication, citing sources, wrote that Mikhailov had tipped off U.S. intelligence about King Servers, the hosting service used to support hacking attacks on targeted voter registration systems in Illinois and Arizona in June. That had followed reports in the New York Times, citing one current and one former government official, that “human sources in Russia did play a crucial role in proving who was responsible for the hacking.”

Nakashima wrote yesterday that “the [FBI] charges are unrelated to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. But the move reflects the U.S. government’s increasing desire to hold foreign governments accountable for malicious acts in cyberspace.”

A shadowy hacking collective called Shaltai-Boltai (Humpty-Dumpty): Also called Anonymous International, Shaltai-Boltai was responsible for leaking early copies of Putin's New Year speech and for selling off “lots” of emails stolen from Russian officials such as Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. In a theory first reported by the pro-Kremlin, conservative Orthodox media company Tsargrad, Mikhailov had taken control of Shaltai-Boltai, “curating and supervising” the group in selecting hacking targets. Later media reports said that the group's leader, Vladimir Anikeyev, had recently been arrested by the FSB and had informed on Mikhailov, Dokuchaev and Stoyanov. A member of the group who fled to Estonia told the Russian media agency Fontanka that they had recently acquired an FSB “coordinator,” although he could not say whether it was Mikhailov. None of the hacks mentioned in the FBI indictment could immediately be confirmed as those carried out by Shaltai-Boltai.

Lawyers contacted by The Post said that in documents they had seen, there was no link to Shaltai-Boltai in the case.

3. A grudge with a cybercriminal: A Russian businessman who had specialized in spam and malware had claimed for years that Mikhailov was trading information on cybercriminals with the West. Mikhailov had reportedly testified in the case ofPavel Vrublevsky,the former head of the payment services company Chronopay, who was imprisoned in 2013 for ordering a denial of service attack on the website of Aeroflot, the Russian national airline. Vrublevsky claimed then that Mikhailov began exchanging information about Russian cybercriminals with Western intelligence agencies, including documents about Chronopay. Brian Krebs, an American journalist who investigates cybercrime and received access to Vrublevsky's emails, wrote in January: “Based on how long Vrublevsky has been trying to sell this narrative, it seems he may have finally found a buyer.”

Infighting at the FSB: The Russian government is not monolithic, and infighting between and within the powerful law enforcement agencies is common. The Russian business publication RBC had written that Mikhailov and Dokuchaev's Center for Information Security had been in conflict with another department with similar responsibilities, the FSB's Center for Information Protection and Special Communications. The conflict may have led to the initiation of a criminal case, the paper's sources said.

hmmn

https://www.madcowprod.com/2018/03/03/jerome-corsis-inks-to-alt-right-connected-russian-hackers/

...Corsi, InfoWars’s DC bureau chief, as well as the man many think invented the alt-right, was riding high earlier this week, after USA Today, the country’s highest-circulating paper, published an opinion piece he wrote.

Then, yesterday, he was kicked off YouTube… for life.He had only recently received his first two You Tube strikes—for harassment and/or bullying—late last month.

[img]

Since his banishment, he’s been posting increasingly irate tweets that make it clear than his relationship with the truth is currently a bit stand-offish.

One of his headlines reads: “Dr Jerome Corsi: My YouTube Channel Restored! Alex Jones Infowars.”

[screensht]

A screenshot of Corsi’s shut-down site gives the lie to that little bit of fake news. Maybe it was just wistful thinking.

Say what you want about him, Jerome Corsi traffics in pro-style disinformation. He delivers the goods. He knows what makes his people’s blood race.

Dr. Jerome Corsi may know a few Russian hackers

Jerome Corsi has more to worry about than how many views his video rants are currently receiving. He may be involved in a half-visible criminal conspiracy powering the Russiagate scandal, which is beginning to unravel.

If, as expected, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicts a gaggle of Russian hackers next week, it will be surprising if some of the Americans who facilitated and helped pay for the hackers aren’t taken down as well.

Many are waiting impatiently for the American fellow-conspirators of the Russian hackers’ to be fingered and publicly shamed.

The notion that this number “might could” include Jerome Corsi is enough to set bitter hearts aflutter. But, is this just wishful thinking?

Under America’s racketeering laws, everyone involved in a criminal organization is supposedly guilty of the crimes committed by other members of the group, which could truly trigger a bloodletting.

“Fed up with knives that just won’t cut? Need an Icy Hot Sleeve, a Glass Wizard, or 6 Second Abs? Could you utilize a Bun & Thigh Roller? A Magic Bullet?”

The Russiagate conspiracy has been around — in one form or another— for 15 years, since March of 2003, when a Russian hacker later to become famous named Pavel ‘Red Eye’ Vrublevsky moved into a house in Howard Beach, Queens which was already occupied by a company owned by a Tampa Mobster named Mike Muzio.

Vrublevsky’s re partners LLClisted its business address as 158-49 90th St, a single family residence in Howard Beach. So too Mike Muzio’s blue moon group Inc. involved in pornography and cyber crime. Vrublevsky’s company handled the back end, taking credit cards, through his Moscow company Chronopay.

And this is where things begin to get interesting.

In 2004, Muzio’s Blue Moon Group was a subsidiary of Genesis Intermedia, an Internet start-up used by Saudi arms dealer and ‘fixer’ Adnan Khashoggi in what will become a massive and masterful stock fraud generating a sweet $300 million dollar payday.

Whether Muzio was an active participant is unknown. But he was not shy getting involved in stock fraud later, after he went from working for Adnan Khashoggi t0 an “alt-right” stock fraud ring run by a business partner and Breitbart collaborator of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon,Sarasota’s own Andrew Badolato.

It does not seem to have been a difficult leap, especially since Khashoggi is a charter member of Donald Trump’s Palm Beach ‘homies.’

It was at this time—in 2003—that Russian Mobsters, including Semion Mogilevich, Russia’s Mob’s Mr. Bigski, began colluding with elements of the American Mafia, the nascent alt-right, and Adnan Khashoggi, who was right at home in this company, having been in operations for over 40-years in his long career as a CIA fixer.

Khashoggi’s longevity owed partly to being able to offer the requisite plausible deniability (he’s a foreigner!). As well, they offered the chance to meet starlets, like Paul McCartney’s future wife Heather, in decidedly relaxed circumstances.

Until his death last year in New York Adnan Khashoggi was a fixture in nearly every American scandal since Watergate. He was around for so long that clips from his first big scandal—something to do with bribes and Lockheed—are in black and white.

The staple of spammers everywhere was Viagra, in all its hundreds of mutations. Penile enlargers sold well. Aftersales might include an antenna booster.

The secret life of an agent provocateur

Jerome Corsi, alt-right rabble-rouser, led a secret second life.

Who knew?

In 1995, before his career peddling smears began to take off, reported The Boston Globe, Corsi was involved in ripping off two dozen investors in Minnesota by convincing them to give him money which then magically disappeared, supposedly for investments in Poland.

The FBI didn’t charge Corsi. Several investors sued and won judgments against him, but were unable to collect. Corsi reportedly transferred all his assets and funds to his wife’s name.

Another leader in the American wing of the Russiagate conspiracy was stockbroker Gregg M.S. Berger. Gregg M.S. Berger, however, is not his real name. His real name is Gregg StickelBerger. Easy to see why he changed it.

Both Berger and Corsi worked at shady Gilford Securities, widely rumored to have Mob ties.

Stockbroker StickelBerger used Gilford Securities to serviced two sets of players, in what looks to be the same ongoing conspiracy. One is a Mob-Mafiya strand; the other is Khashoggi’s GenesisIntermedia fraud.

From Reuters:

NEW YORK, Feb 1 (Reuters) – A New York stock broker has been charged with orchestrating a fraudulent $30 million scheme to illegally “pump-and-dump” thinly traded Chinese and Israeli penny stocks, the U.S. Justice Department said. Gregg Berger, 47, was chargedwith one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud, in an indictment unsealed Tuesday in U.S. district court in Detroit. He faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.

In a related case, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil fraud charges against Berger, seven other people, and three companies involved in the alleged scheme, including one company in Canada.

A “China-Israeli micro stock play”

Gregg Berger worked with Alan M. Ralsky, known as America’s Spam King. The two men commit financial fraud together, then plead guilty in 2009 to conspiracy.

In their joint effort, Berger ran a $33 million international microcap stock scheme involving the stocks of eight small U.S. companies “headquartered” overseas, in the People’s Republic of China, Canada, and Israel.

The companies were used in reverse mergers with local non-U.S. companies looking for a back door into U.S. financial markets.

Stockbroker Berger ran two conspiracies. One was the China-Israeli micro stock play, for which Berger was eventually indicted, along with Al Ralsky, a cast of virtual unknowns… and a Russian named Peter Severa.

Make that Russian hacker Peter Severa. Who was safe in Russia, until, five years after his American partners are convicted, makes the mistake of going on

[pix]

vacation in Spain…. Or… he was lured to Spain.

In either event, under Spanish skies, the Russian hacker was arrested by Spanish police, where it turned out Peter Severa was not his real name.

It was Peter Levashov, #7 on the world’s Top 10 Worst Spammers list, according to a Russian cyber-security company. A Justice Department indictment asserts Levashov is the long-time Russian partner of American Alan Ralsky of West Bloomfield Michigan.

After the U.S. won a titanic struggle with Russia for control of where he would be extradited, he was recently extradited to the United States.

It’s a simple declension. Jerome Corsi has ties to Gregg Berger. Berger was partners with America’s Spam King Al Ralsky. He partnered with Peter Levashov. As well as with Jonathan Curshen.

One of Khashoggi’s partners named Michael Farkas bought a spy store in Miami. The group began soliciting sales over the Internet in earnest.

“Need a pair of sunglasses fitted with a fiber-optic video camera? A shirt button concealing a surveillance microphone? How about a bullet-proof umbrella, or a baseball cap strong enough to repel a hatchet blow?

Uber-hackers working for uber-oligarchs

At the same time he was working with Ralsky and his crew, busy fraudster (but on whose behalf?) Gregg Berger was also part of a criminal conspiracy involving Sarasota native Jonathan Curshen, another example of that Florida city’s lack of either ethics or charm.

With Curshen’s lavish assistance, Berger helms an effort to pump and dump the stock of a little nothing company (literally, there was nothing there) called CO2.

Back to the first conspiracy. One of the eight American shell companies located overseas that Berger and Ralsky are using is something called “China Digital.”

Which leads back to Jonathan Curshen, part of Berger Conspiracy No. 2.

In Berger’s Conspiracy no 1. Curshen helped manipulate “China Digital’s stock price. So Berger’s two known criminal conspiracies must be part of one larger overarching conspiracy.

Which means that — in the best of all possible worlds — each and every ‘connected’ miscreant who has helped move the conspiracy forward is now, as a matter of law, guilty of every crime committed by each one of their fellow conspirators.

Jonathan Curshen was in business with Steve Bannon’s alt-right business partner Andy Badolato in Sarasota, Florida.

According to a criminal Complaint filed Sept 4, 2008, Curshen, along with someone named Bruce Grossman, schemed to defraud investors in a company called Industrial Biotechnology Corporation (“IBC”) by paying secret cash kickbacks to an undercover FBI agent, who was posing as a middleman willing to recruit corrupt stockbrokers.

Who controlled Industrial Biotechnology Corporation (“IBC”)? Serial alt-right fraudster Andy Badolato.

Teddy bears. Some Viagra? A mail-order bride? Fake diplomas were steady earners. But of course they didn’t sell nearly as well as hard-core pornography videos. Nothing did.

Before there was Jesus there was John the Baptist

Before there was Donald Trump, there was Jerome Corsi. His supremely distasteful “Swift Boat” book, filled with lies and calumny, did in an authentic war hero (no matter what you thought of his politics), 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry.

Later Corsi lobbed another grenade over the transom called “Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President.”

Slight problem: in a bit of horrific timing that makes you question whether there might not be a God after all, Corsi’s book came out three weeksafter Obama’s birth certificate had been released, and promptly tanked.

That’s when Alex Jones told his audience he and Corsi were receiving warnings from “top government officials”—presumably because a mid-level functionary wouldn’t convey the seriousness of the matter—while preparing to publish the true story of something or other.

“Threats started pouring in,” Alex Jones told his listeners. Even his own lawyers, he said, advised him against breaking the story.

It’s enough to give you chills.

The real story of the Russian hackers is a story of the increasing levels of expertise they began to display. They were working hard to master the Internet’s arts of persuasion.

As the Russians began stretching their computer skills beyond the reach of their American cousins, Adnan Khashoggi and sidekick Ramy El Batrawi’s GenesisIntermedia provided the only outfit who could stay with them.

Spammers—in Russia and the U.S.—sold vacation giveaways, mortgages, work-at-home opportunities…Loans!

Successful spammers were soon living large.

This is what hackers, Russian and American, did. Control millions of servers. Write a zesty little sales pitch. Slam some cloak-and-dagger software through a massive database of e-mail addresses.

Then deluge the planet like the wrath of a vengeful God.

A threat to proto-fascists everywhere

Not since the glory days of Iran-Contra has the group Donald Trump is fronting for—the so-called “Alt-Right”—received so much bad publicity. Yet even after all this time the group— as a long-standing drug trafficking, financial fraud and money laundering operation— remains recognizable. One anchor over the decades, for example, has been Adnan Khashoggi.

Khashoggi, and his lieutenant Ramy El-Batrawi, both of whom were deeply implicated in Iran Contra, would have a last hurrah in Russiagate.

So too would Americans like Tampa Mobster Mike Muzio, currently away doing 13 years at a federal penitentiary in Minnesota. There he tweets about looking forward to getting out in 2020.

While the players on the ground were releasing press releases announcing orders from each other for billions of dollars worth of product that didn’t exist, from other businesses which were members of the conspiracy.

The phony companies were often led by former agents from U.S. military intelligence, the CIA, and the NSA (atSkyway Aircraft,which we’ll get to presently), as well as alt-right factotums like Andy Badolato, Jerome Corsi, and Jonathan Curshen.

Facing them across the table was a roving posse of Russian hackers, as well as a squadron of Russian Mobsters like Oleg Deripaska.

The story of our time is about Donald Trump and the globalization of organized crime. It’s intrinsically more interesting than the one being surfaced so far.

:{https://www.madcowprod.com/:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{2016/09/21/:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{trump-campaigns-bannon-ties-to-sarasota-grifter/:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

...Stock fraud, for example, an increasingly popular pastime in Florida, which provided links between Badolato and names already notorious for being part of an ongoing criminal conspiracy.

The location varies between Sarasota and St. Petersburg, Florida, home to St Petersburg-Clearwater InternationalAirport, where at least two Badolato associates were involved with companies owning drug planes, which took off with some regularity from there on flights down to South America and back.

Because active retirees make St. Petersburg an international shuffleboard hot spot — Aspen for snowbirds from the Upper Midwest — some wag dubbed the drug trafficking organization (DTO) :{ :(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}::{The Shuffleboard Cartel.:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

As astute readers are undoubtedly aware, St. Petersburg is also the home of theworld’s largest shuffleboard club.TheShuffleboard Hall of Fame is right next door in Clearwater.

If you’re looking to get into drug trafficking, you want a benign host, filled with people who don’t ask too many questions. So you could do a lot worse than St Petersburg, home of All Things Shuffleboard, and Venice, Florida, which boasts the second-oldest population in the entire United States.

Welcome to Andy’s World-Wide Web

Like nighttime bonfires attract drum circles, Bannon’s hasty change-of-residence to Badolato’s Sarasota beach house under pressure from reporters has attracted attention.

How odd to discover someone close to Donald Trump’s campaign chairman who’s been peddling phony companies with no product, no prospects, and nothing to sell… companies whose websites disappear into the ether with frightening regularity.

If you squint through the flickering flames, you can glimpse a few familiar faces from Florida’s unusually generous bounty of grifters, racketeers and flim-flam men.Some even have close ties to America’s national security state.

Like one of Andy Badolato’s partners in Sarasota, Jonathan Curshen, publicly fingered as a principal player in the stock fraud and drug trafficking ring centered around SkyWay Aircraft of St. Petersburg.

Specifically Curshen invented a Dupont heirwhose largesse helped SkyWay buy a DC-9 airliner busted in Mexico in 2006 while carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine.

Jonathan Curshen made a deal with Badolato to sell 3 million shares of an Andy Badolato company he’d founded and led calledIndustrial BioTechnology Corporation (IBOT), through Curshen’s Costa Rica brokerage company, Red Sea Management,in exchange for a 25 percent cut of the proceeds.

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Curshen made a big mistake, according to federal prosecutors. He bribed an undercover FBI agent he thought represented brokers handling the accounts of wealthy customers. Caught red-handed, Curshen pled guilty to paying bribes to stock brokers to buy Badolato’s company’s stock.

What makes Jonathan Curshen interesting to a probe of officially-sponsored organized crime is that Curshen’s Red Sea Management,according to filings with the SEC, also supplied the DC-9 airliner (N900SA) busted in Mexico’s Yucatan carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine.

At the time of the big bust, FAA records showed the DC-9 was registered to a SkyWay Aircraft principal, Frederic Geffon, who regularly commingled funds between SkyWay and other entities he owned, like Royal Sons Motor Yachts, and Royal Sons LLC.

Geffon had been investigated for drug trafficking ten years earlier. The DEA had not filed charges. In aviation circles there was widespread suspicion Geffon escaped doing time by flipping and going to work as an informant for the DEA.

Jonathan Strikes A Pose]

In criminal jargon it’s called working off a beef.

Reported the Oct 10, 2008 Vancouver Sun: “Jonathan Randall Curshen…controlled a company in Costa Rica called Red Sea Management, which had generously provided, in return for 28,000,000 shares of common stock in SkyWay,…a 1966 McDonald Douglas DC-9 aircraft that shortly thereafter was carrying a cargo of 5.6 tons of cocaine, worth several hundred million dollars. This is a strange case.”

Today Jonathan Curshenis serving 17 yearsin federal prison. Curshen and SkyWay Aircraft were associated with a network that included a surprising number of people who were former members of military intelligence, or the CIA, or the Genovese Mafia Family in New York City.

While his his ties to Republican politicians, like his current campaign client Donald Trump, are visible for everyone to see, tomorrow we’ll ask: Does Steve Bannon have national security ties?

Sarasota’s very own “hyena pack”

Evidence strongly suggests that Andy Badolato and associates are what fraud and money laundering investigators calla”hyena pack;” fraudsters acting in concert to shred the investments of clueless shareholders who bought into a clutch of sad-looking penny stock companies that were an excuse for schemes netting then tens of millions of dollars.

This latest ‘blemish’ on the Trump brand comes in the wake of last week’s story in Newsweek which shed light on Trump’s foreign business dealings. The story exposed evidence that a number of Trump’s overseas partners have been looting their home countries with the same sleazy avarice which became infamous in the U.S. after the scams of Wall Street’s predatory elite crippled the American economy in 2008.

News that Trump’s Presidential campaign manager is hanging his hat in the home of a fraudster with similar proclivities is probably not the most hopeful of signs.

Note: Badolato was contacted and asked for comment on this story. Apparently he declined. It happens.

TOMORROW: DRILLING DOWN INTO ANDY’S DOOMED PUBLIC COMPANIES TAGS:

ref

https://www.madcowprod.com/**2007/11/23/**our-story-thus-far/

https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/02/02/the-fsb-purge-two-narratives/

The FSB PURGE: TWO NARRATIVES

February 2, 2017/6 Comments/in Russian hacks /by emptywheel

I first mentioned the arrest of a Kaspersky researcher for treason last week. Since then, more of the American press has been focusing on it, often simply assuming that what are now reported to be up to six arrests must have some tie to the Russian hack of the DNC and other election-related targets.

One way or another, the arrests—according to the Russian media accounts—are linked to the country’s hacking of the US election.

Such assumptions don’t even engage with some of the most obvious questions, such as what all these FSB-related arrests would have to do with the hack-and-leak of DNC and Podesta emails allegedly done by Russia’s military intelligence GRU.

Obviously, the timing of the arrests would suggest there might be a connection, but the presumption has been downright sloppy. So in an effort to unpack this story, I’m going to lay out some of the known claimed details

Some of the better English language sources on the arrests are stories in Bloomberg, Guardian, FT, NYT, and Forbes (as well as the Brian Krebs story quoted in detail below).

COMMITTING CRIMES PRE-DATING 2012

When news of Stoyanov’s arrest was made public, Kaspersky released a statement saying the activity pre-dated his employment at the security firm, so before 2013. That would seem to rule out involvement in the DNC hack.

EXPOSING KING SERVERS AS KEY INFRASTRUCTURE IN RUSSIAN HACKS

A more public explanation behind the purge is that Stoyanov and Mikhailov served as sources for the FBI on the investigation into the probes of the state election sites.

On August 18, the FBI released a flash about two probes of US state election websites. Among the details, it released an IP address, 5.149.249.172, associated with the probe. “The FBI received information of an additional IP address, 5.149.249.172, which was detected in the July 2016 compromise of a state’s Board of Election Web site.” Why you would need two human sources for this information, I’m not sure, but the implication in this narrative is that it came from the Russians.

On September 2, ThreatConnect released a report analyzing the IP address, tying it to other suspected Russian hacks.

However, as we looked into the 5.149.249[.]172 IP address within the FBI Flash Bulletin, we uncovered a spearphishing campaign targeting Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party, Ukrainian Parliament, and German Freedom Party figures from March – August 2016 that fits a known Russian targeting focus and modus operandi. As we explored malicious activity in the IP ranges around 5.149.249[.]172 we found additional linkages back to activity that could be evidence of Russian advanced persistent threat (APT) activity. This connection around the 5.149.249[.]172 activity is more suggestive of state-backed rather than criminally motivated activity, although we are unable to assess which actor or group might be behind the attacks based on the current evidence.

At the time, the guy who owns King Servers, which hosts that IP, Vladimir Fomenko, played dumb, claiming that the entities tied to the election website hacks owed him money and that the FBI had never contacted him but that he’d be happy to provide information.

More recently, Brian Krebs pulled up some of his old reporting to note that Fomenko has long-established ties to spam businessman Pavel Vrublevsky, including with these servers. Vrublevsky has been trying to implicate Mikhaylov and Stoyanov in leaking Russian investigative details to people in the west for years.

Multiple Russian media outlets covering the treason case mention that King-Servers and its owner Fomenko rented the servers from a Dutch company controlled by Vrublevsky.

Both Fomenko and Vrublevsky deny this, but the accusations got me looking more deeply through my huge cache of leaked ChronoPay emails for any mention of Mikhaylov or Stoyanov — the cybercrime investigators arrested in Russia last week and charged with treason. I also looked because in phone interviews in 2011 Vrublevsky told me he suspected both men were responsible for leaking his company’s emails to me, to the FBI, and to Kimberly Zenz, a senior threat analyst who works for the security firm iDefense (now owned by Verisign).

In that conversation, Vrublevsky said he was convinced that Mikhaylov was taking information gathered by Russian government cybercrime investigators and feeding it to U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies and to Zenz. Vrublevsky told me then that if ever he could prove for certain Mikhaylov was involved in leaking incriminating data on ChronoPay, he would have someone “tear him a new asshole.”

Krebs’ story would date Stoyanov’s actions to before his ties with Kaspersky, which would explain that part. But it would also suggest this might be product of a long-standing feud — or that the long-standing feud provides cover for a fight for power within the FSB.

One thing that’s interesting about all this is that, for some time, the US intelligence community did not attribute the probes of voter registration databases to Russian intelligence. A September 20 DHS alert attributed it to criminal hackers seeking identity theft data. The October 7 ODNI/DHS statement affirmatively declined to attribute it. It was not until the January 6, 2017 report on the hacks that the IC first blamed Russian intelligence (without specifying whether it was FSB or GRU) for the probes.

So if the FSB purge pertains to revealing details about the voter database probes to US intelligence, the first US public acknowledgment of that intelligence came after most people allegedly involved in exposing the tie had been arrested (though people like former Russian Ambassador Michael McFaul were yapping about such things in public statements, and the WaPo had gotten soft leaks about it). That is, in spite of complaints that US reporting might have set off this molehunt, for the registration databases, the molehunt preceded the IC’s affirmative (public) use of the data.

HACK-AND-LEAKING TOP RUSSIANS

The other major allegation against the Russians is that they were involved with a hacking group Shaltai Boltai (which translates as Humpty Dumpty from Alice in Wonderland). The group has blackmailed and/or exposed the emails of a number of top Russian leaders, including Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and his deputy Arkady Dvorkovich.

Reports claim that Anikeev started the group years earlier, and the FSB either tried to infiltrate it, but then got swept up, or always had ties to it. Ultimately, though, the implication is that FSB was working both sides, using an Anonymous-modeled hacking group to acquire materials on powerful Russians even while, perhaps, using such hackers for Russian ends.

In mid-to-late October, the group released the emails of Vladislav Surkov, the architect of Putin’s Ukrainian policy. There wasn’t much revealed, though it did make it clear planning for Russia’s Ukrainian intervention went back some time. The understanding behind this narrative is that releasing these emails got too close to Putin, which led to the crack-down on the group.

Even when the emails got released, there was no public discussion of the possibility that this was US retaliation against Russia — not even after NBC published a really dick-wagging story on October 14 promising CIA retaliation. That’s the public story, anyway, which was really weird, given that exposing Putin’s plotting in Ukraine would be a really logical retaliation for the DNC hack (even if American exceptionalists like to pretend we would never do a hack and dump). The private story is different, but any private opinions I’ve heard don’t describe who might have conducted such a hack.

It’s also not entirely clear the timing works out. But it’s not clear we’ve got all those details yet.

I’m still working through these issues — and warnings from Russian observers that both of these narratives may just be convenient front stories for something else and/or for pure power consolidation are well taken.

What has also gone unmentioned is that at a time when Russia and the US would be staring each other down on a “cyber” battlefield, Putin just apparently took out a number of the key players in that field. No one has mentioned that, but even if these guys were working both sides in a manner that brought value to Putin, having them removed may leave holes in Russia’s cyber offense for the near future.

Update: This FT piece, based off an interview with what is alleged to be the last remaining Shaltai Boltai member at large, would seem to confirm that that explains the arrests (it explains the SB got FSB handlers in early 2016). Though I’d ask why someone would return from Thailand to apply for asylum in Estonia if Putin were after them.

KNOWN ARRESTEES

Colonel Sergey Mikhailov, deputy head of the Information Security Center at the FSB

Major Dmitry Dokuchaev (AKA Forb), also with ISC

Ruslan Stoyanov, now with Kaspersky but with earlier with cybercrime investigation firm Indryk and before that Ministry of Interior’s Cyber Crime Unit

Journalist Vladimir Anikeev, believed to have been in Ukraine and alleged to have led the hack ofVladislav Surkov

KNOWN DATES

August 18: FBI flash identifying new King Servers-related IP address used in probes of election related sites

September 2: ThreatConnect report implicating King Servers

September 5: Obama and Putin discuss hacks at G-20

September 20: DHS alert attributes voter registration probes to criminal hackers in search of PII

September 27: King Servers owner Vladimir Fomenko claims FBI hasn’t contacted him

October 7: ODNI/DHS statement on Russian hacking declines to attribute voter database hacks to Russian state

October 14: CIA preparing possible cyber response on Russia

October 23-25: Hackers release emails of Vladislav Surkov, exposing Putin’s Ukrainian plans

October 31: Obama contacts Putin on red cyber phone for first time

November 9: Anikeev reportedly detained, begins cooperating

November 26: Anonymous White House statement affirms integrity of election

December 4: Arrests of Mikhailov and Stoyanov

December 9: CIA-based leaks (based off recent human intelligence) claim DNC hack designed to get Trump elected

December 13: Last date on (partial) dossier implicating Trump

January 6, 2017: In declassified Russian Hack Report, US Intelligence Community for the first time attributes probes of voter websites to Russian intelligence (not specifying FSB or GRU): “Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards.”

January 11: Partial anti-Trump dossier published by BuzzFeed; Christopher Steele flees his home

January 23: GCHQ head Robert Hannigan quits to spend more time with his family

January 25: Kommersant announces arrests