Officials Pull Plug on "Online Bazaar" For Thieves

Federal prosecutors on Monday announced identity theft and other charges against a Belarusian man who created a Web site that helped identity thieves bypass bank security measures — and that was, according to authorities, “an online bazaar for dangerous identity thieves.”

The U.S. Attorney for Manhattan and officials with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York office announced on Monday the unsealing of a federal indictment against Dmitry M. Naskovets. At the request of U.S. officials, authorities in the Czech Republic arrested Naskovets on April 15, pending his extradition to the United States.

Authorities said Naskovets and an accomplice created and operated a Web site called CallService.biz, an online business that assisted more than 2,000 identity thieves in more than 5,000 instances of fraud.

Among other things, the Web site worked to get around security measures put in place by financial institutions, federal authorities said.

For example, they said, banks sometimes require persons seeking to make withdrawals from accounts to verify certain information by telephone. Through the Web site, Naskovets and an accomplice, in exchange for a fee, provided the services of English- and German-speaking persons to thieves who had stolen information about the accounts. Those persons then posed as the account holders to allow for funds transfers and withdrawals.

Naskovets’s co-conspirator, Sergey Semashko, also from Belarus, has been arrested by Belarusian authorities. Lithuanian authorities have seized the computers on which the Web site was hosted.

“Cybercrime poses an increasingly grave threat to American and European financial institutions and their customers,” Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Monday in announcing the indictment. “Dmitry Naskovets's website was essentially an online bazaar for dangerous identity thieves. ... Today, we have shut down that business and protected untold thousands of potential victims of identity theft. “

If convicted on all charges against him, Naskovets faces a maximum prison sentence of 39 years and six months.