A money mule driver from Odessa in an American prison

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The Federal Attorney's Office for the Western District of North Carolina reported that the court of this district in the city of Charlotte on February 11 sentenced 38-year-old Aleksanr Sergeevich Musienko, a native of Odessa and a citizen of Ukraine, to 87 months in prison.

Musienko, aka Robert Davis and aka "Pli", was arrested on the order of this court in South Korea, where he flew on vacation. In 2018, and on March 28, 2019, he was extradited to the United States. The next day, Musienko was in North Carolina, where he was taken to Federal Court Charlotte before Magistrate Judge David Kayer, who briefed him on charges of fraud and money laundering.

The judge ordered Musienko to be taken into custody, but he is not in the database of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and Aleksandr Sergeyevich is being held in the Mecklenburg MCJC jail in Charlotte, where he is listed as a “foreigner” and “federal prisoner” 6 feet 2 inches tall with no expected release date ...

Musienko was defended by court-appointed, that is, free lawyers for him, Anthony Shire and Jeffrey Brickman, and the case was heard by Judge David Keesler, who was appointed in 2004 by President Bush Jr. A grand jury of the federal court for the Western District of North Carolina in June 2016 brought “Alexander Musienko, aka Oleksandr Serkhiovich Musienko, aka Robert Davis and aka Pli,” charges of two types of fraud and two types of money laundering, after which the case # 5: 16 CR29 was classified for two years, until Musienko was arrested in South Korea.

The indictment explains that the investigation was carried out by the FBI, and the international department of the State Department helped the extradition of Musienko with the support of the South Korean authorities. It is not specified exactly where and how Alexander Sergeevich was detained, although such stories are usually covered by local media. On November 20, 2019, Musienko pleaded guilty only to wire transfer fraud.

Three days later, the prosecutor's office sent a confirmation to the Penitentiary Service that Aleksandr Musienko with his two "chasers" had pleaded guilty to being "an organizer, leader, manager or leader of criminal activity. At the same time, he “knowingly and falsely registered the databases and knowingly used them to commit offenses. At the same time, the amount of established or alleged damage from his actions "exceeded $ 3.5 million and did not exceed $ 9.5 million," and "there were more than 10 victims."

According to the prosecution, from 2009 to 2012, Alexander Musienko collaborated with cybercriminals from Eastern Europe, who during this time stole at least $ 2.8 million from the bank accounts of US citizens and laundered the stolen money abroad. Another court document claims that during the same time, cybercriminals from Eastern Europe stole and laundered about $ 5 million in the United States. Musienko's role in this scam was that he found and recruited "mules" who, for a reward, received the stolen money into their bank personal and corporate accounts and transferred them to specified addresses outside the United States, receiving 5% of the amount of each transfer. while Musienko's share was 25%.

Alexander Musienko did this under the pseudonym Robert Davis and on behalf of the dummy companies Vita Finance AG and Hilpert AG opened in Switzerland and Germany, and hired mules as financial assistants. In April 2019, that is, after the arrest of Musienko, but before his extradition, FBI investigators found files in the laptop seized from Alexander Sergeevich containing about 120 thousand credit card numbers and passwords, as well as associated identification information. As it was later established, Musienko received all this data in 2018 and did not have time to use it, but "prepared for this, trying to avoid detection or responsibility."

The accusation alleged, and Musienko admitted, that in September 2011, his fellow hackers used a virus to hack the corporate account of a senior financier at North Carolina-based Von Drehle, which runs as Victim VDC. The hackers withdrew $ 296,278 from this account and transferred this amount to two bank accounts of Alexander Sergeevich's "mules".

Then, at the direction of Musienko, this money was transferred to several accounts in banks in Europe, but the Von Drehle Corporation found the loss and managed to "freeze" the transfer abroad of $ 197,526 and 36 cents. In addition to Victim VDC, the case also includes Other Victims - businesses and individuals across the United States who have dealt with computers and have become victims of hackers; Bank # 1, with offices in North Carolina; and Western Union, used by cybercriminals to transfer money.

As blogger Timur Musin popularly explained, “in zoology, a mule is a hybrid of a donkey and a horse, which is equally similar to both of its parents, but has advantages in great strength and endurance. The ideal beast of burden. In turn, in the science of finance, under the money mule (in the Russian-speaking common people - "cashier") is understood as a person who is used to migrate funds from some individuals and organizations to others.

It should be noted that, as a rule, this money is of a criminal nature and is obtained from various types of crimes (drug trafficking, prostitution, human trafficking, corruption or tax evasion). The services of cashing mules are designed to give them a legal look, withdraw money from the country, avoid taxes, and also hide the real, or rather criminal, source of their origin. "

The Pre-Sentence Report (PSR), which is common in our judicial system, studied Musienko's past and reported to Judge David Kisler that Aleksandr Sergeevich "had been involved in cybercrime for almost his entire adult life." After graduating from university in 2004, in 2005 and 2008, he received degrees and, by his own admission, in 2009, when he was 26 years old, committed the first fraud, which he then did for almost 10 years until his arrest in 2018.

According to Musienko, in Odessa, he earned about 2 thousand dollars a month at his enterprise, but, "judging by the evidence, he received much more from the 25% of stolen profits he was entitled to." Moreover, the recommendation reads, “Musienko's art in cybercrime was demonstrated by the use of several shell companies, domains (databases - AG) and email addresses for scams; the confusion of his real name and the use of cybercriminal forums, where he advertised the services of his mules to other cybercriminals. "

The fact that Alexander Musienko was arrested with the data of 120 thousand stolen credit cards, PSR considers not just direct evidence of a scam, but "a demonstration that in this case cybercrimes were not a deviation from the norm." According to the prosecutor's office in the charge, the three years that this scam lasted and the $ 3.5 million that Musienko's victims lost could be "the tip of the iceberg of the history of his crimes, and the sentence to 87 months corresponds to his history and characteristics." Is it any wonder after that that Judge David Keesler took this document into account and fulfilled it word for word, in addition to more than 7 years in prison, obliging him to pay Von Drehle Corporation $ 98,751 and 64 cents.

A few days before the verdict, the prosecutor's office sent the judge a letter of consent from the prosecution and the defense so that senior prosecutor Mona Sidki was present at the verdict of Musienko not in person, but by video link, since she is on business in Washington as an assistant to the Minister of Justice. Restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic have prevented her from arriving in Charlotte at the judge's deadline, and will be replaced by Graham Billings, Assistant Attorney General for the Western District of North Carolina.

The last document in the Musienko case is dated February 10, 2021, that is, the day before the verdict, a letter from his lawyers Shir and Brickman to Judge Kissler. Lawyers are asking to "restrict public access to the hearing room during the testimony of FBI agent David Katkowski," as "the subject of the testimony and the reason for the restriction are specified in the defendant's memorandum in support of the request to hear the case behind closed doors." As they say in the Russian-speaking people, it is not clear, but great. And in the whole of Odessa there was only one 38-year-old Alexander Sergeevich Musienko, who constantly lives on Prokhorovskaya Street, and is currently in the prison of Mecklenburg County in North Carolina. Both dates of his birth are the same day to day.