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The 37-year-old Ukrainian Vitalii Chychasov acknowledged planning to sell the personal data of almost 24 million people. Through the sale of the stolen data, Chychasov and his cohorts gained more than $19 million. In accordance with court records, the operation’s investigators bought something from ssndob.club covertly in late May 2020.
The detectives discovered a wallet that received a total of 989 bitcoin during August 2017 and October 2021 after tracking the bitcoin used to make the purchase. In 19 transactions, the wallet had transferred almost 45.99 bitcoins to a HitBTC account. HitBTC data obtained showed that Chychasov was the owner of the receiving account. When opening the account, Chychasov used his Ukrainian passport as identification.
Further research found Chychasov had a Bitfinex account with the pseudonym “ramashka.” The email [email protected] was used to access the account. On November 4, 2015, this email address was used to sign up for the ssnob.ws domain.
Chychasov’s Bitfinex account received about 53.6 bitcoin from the SSNOB bitcoin wallet between August 2017 and September 2018.
The Investigation
The SSNOB marketplace’s administrators had a Jabber client installed, according to forensic examination of the admin servers for that platform. Jabber accounts that are connected include [email protected] and [email protected]. Additionally, the servers held several compressed files with stolen personal data on them. One million people’s information was contained in each file.
On June 7, 2022, the investigators seized the domains for the marketplace, including ssndob.ws, ssndob.vip, ssndob.club, and blackjob.biz. Chychasov was detained in March 2022, and in July 2022, he was returned to the United States. Sergey Pugach, one of his accomplices, was detained in May 2022. Chychasov admitted guilt and also consented to forfeit $5 million. He is up against the maximum serving time.