Three men have been charged in the hacking of JP Morgan as well as over a dozen other companies. The men are part of an international criminal network that has seen hundreds of millions of dollars in profit from their crimes.
Indictments against three men associated with a world wide criminal underworld were handed down in Atlanta and Manhattan on Tuesday, charging the trio with the JP Morgan related hacking of a year ago. The men are charged with one of the biggest cybercrimes in history. They are accused of hacking into JP Morgan and over a dozen other companies, stealing the personal data of over 100 million people.
The Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office said that the criminal network extended through many parts of the world, according to The Wall Street Journal. The men were involved with criminal networks located in South Africa, Cyprus, and Brazil, as well as laundering credit cards through Azerbaijan. Much of the money was laundered through the Cyprus network.
The charges claim that the three members hacked into at least a dozen giant investment banks, stole the information and then looked to quickly launder, sell and dump the information for a profit. They were also responsible for other criminal activity including at least a dozen illegal online casinos, an unlicensed bitcoin operation, and a payment system exchange for others in the criminal underworld.
One of their successful ventures was to inflate the prices of certain penny stocks and then convince people to buy them using the stolen names from the data. The leader behind these vast schemes and underworld network, prosecutors state, is Israeli Gery Shalon, 31, who is a known braggart and dreamed of a vast criminal empire.
Their biggest haul was from JP Morgan, where they stole 83 million names and personal information. Prosecutors believe that Shalon and his team have hidden at least $100 million is private accounts with Swiss banks. The team hacked into JP Morgan using a rented server located somewhere in Egypt. After they made the hack and retrieved the information, they shut down and canceled use of the server.
Prosecutors commented on how difficult it is to stay one step ahead of brilliant and sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals despite security precautions and the war chest of a JP Morgan to try and insure total security.
