Vladimir Tsastin has quite a history in cyber fraud and other digital criminal activities. Back in 2008 he was convicted in Estonia (his home country) of credit card fraud, money laundering, document forgery and other criminal activities. These charges were related to a scheme to hack into payment systems for online retailers.
In addition, he ran a hosting company known as EstDomains Inc. This hosting company was well known for hosting criminal websites that infected users with malware, spam and even child pornography.
His latest issues just took place in Manhattan. He was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan to 7-1/4 years in prison and to forfeit $2.5 million. He was convicted of running a cyber crimal system that was used to infect over four million computers worldwide with malware. The malware was part of an elaborate click fraud system.
Judge Kaplan commented, “It was brazen, it was sophisticated, it was outrageous.”
After the conviction Tsastin commented that he regretted what he did and blamed his own stupidity for his ceramal actions. He was here after being extradited from Estonia in October of 2014. After the sentence is completed here he is still facing additional prison time in Estonia for the other convictions.
While his crimes are in the past, this case certainly shows just how seriously the courts around the world are starting to take cyber-criminal activity.
