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The United States today unveiled sanctions and indictments against the alleged proprietor of Joker’s Stash, a now-defunct cybercrime store that peddled tens of millions of payment cards stolen in some of the largest data breaches of the past decade. The government also indicted and sanctioned a top Russian cybercriminal known as Taleon, whose cryptocurrency exchange Cryptex has evolved into one of Russia’s most active money laundering networks.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) today unsealed an indictment against a 38-year-old man from Novosibirsk, Russia for allegedly operating Joker’s Stash, an extremely successful carding shop that came online in late 2014. Joker’s sold cards stolen in a steady drip of breaches at U.S. retailers, including Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord and Taylor, Bebe Stores, Hilton Hotels, Jason’s Deli, Whole Foods, Chipotle, Wawa, Sonic Drive-In, the Hy-Vee supermarket chain, Buca Di Beppo, and Dickey’s BBQ.

The government believes the brains behind Joker’s Stash is Timur Kamilevich Shakhmametov, an individual who is listed in Russian incorporation documents as the owner of Arpa Plus, a Novosibirsk company that makes mobile games.

Early in his career (circa 2000) Shakhmametov was known as “v1pee” and was the founder of the Russian hacker group nerf[.]ru, which periodically published hacking tools and exploits for software vulnerabilities.

By 2004, v1pee had adopted the moniker “Vega” on the exclusive Russian language hacking forum Mazafaka, where this user became one of the more reliable vendors of stolen payment cards.

In the years that followed, Vega would cement his reputation as a top carder on other forums, including Verified, DirectConnection, and Carder[.]pro.

Vega also became known as someone who had the inside track on “unlimited cashouts,” a globally coordinated cybercrime scheme in which crooks hack a bank or payment card processor and use cloned cards at cash machines to rapidly withdraw millions of dollars in just a few hours.

“Hi, there is work on d+p, unlimited,” Vega wrote in a private message to another user on Verified in Dec. 2012, referring to “dumps and PINs,” the slang term for stolen debit cards with the corresponding PINs that would allow ATM withdrawals.

Joker’s Stash came online in the wake of several enormous card breaches at retailers like Target and Home Depot, and the resulting glut of inventory had depressed prices for stolen cards. But Joker’s would distinguish itself by catering to high-roller customers — essentially street gangs in the United States that would purchase thousands of stolen payment cards in one go.

Faced with a buyer’s market, Joker’s Stash set themselves apart by focusing on loyalty programs, frequent buyer discounts, money-back guarantees, and just plain good customer service. Big spenders were given access to the most freshly hacked payment cards, and were offered the ability to get free replacement cards if any turned out to be duds.

Joker’s Stash also was unique because it claimed to sell only payment cards that its own hackers had stolen directly from merchants. At the time, card shops typically resold payment cards that were stolen and supplied by many third-party hackers of unknown reliability or reputation.

In January 2021, Joker’s Stash announced it was closing up shop, after European authorities seized a number of servers for the fraud store, and its proprietor came down with the Coronavirus.

A DOJ statement credits the U.S. Secret Service for leading the years-long investigations (the Service’s original mandate was not protecting the president; it was pursuing counterfeiters, and modern-day carders definitely qualify as that). Prosecutors allege Joker’s Stash earned revenues of at least $280 million, but possibly more than $1 billion (the broad range is a consequence of several variables, including the rapid fluctuation in the price of bitcoin and the stolen goods they were peddling).

TALEON

The proprietors of Joker’s Stash may have sold tens of millions of stolen payment cards, but Taleon is by far the bigger fish in this law enforcement action because his various cryptocurrency and cash exchanges have allegedly helped to move billions of dollars into and out of Russia over the past 20 years.

An indictment unsealed today names Taleon as Sergey Sergeevich Ivanov, 44, of Saint Petersburg, Russia. The government says Ivanov, who likely changed his surname from Omelnitskii at some point, laundered money for Joker’s Stash, among many other cybercrime stores.

In a statement today, the Treasury Department said Ivanov has laundered hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of virtual currency for ransomware actors, initial access brokers, darknet marketplace vendors, and other criminal actors for approximately the last 20 years.

First appearing on Mazafaka in the early 2000s, Taleon was known on the forums as someone who could reliably move large amounts of physical cash. Sources familiar with the investigation said Taleon’s service emerged as one of the few remaining domestic cash delivery services still operating after Russia invaded Ukraine in Feb. 2022.

Taleon set up his service to facilitate transfers between Moscow, St. Petersburg and financial institutions in the West. Taleon’s private messages on some hacker forums have been leaked over the years and indexed by the cyber intelligence platform Intel 471. Those messages indicate Taleon worked on many of the same ATM cashouts as Vegas, so it’s clear the two had an established business relationship well before Joker’s Stash came into being.

Sometime around 2013, Taleon launched a partnership with a money transfer business called pm2btc[.]me. PM2BTC allowed customers to convert funds from the virtual currency Perfect Money (PM) into bitcoin, and then have the balance (minus a processing fee) available on a physical debit card that could be used at ATMs, for shopping online, or at retail stores.

The U.S. government itself set things in motion for Taleon’s nascent cryptocurrency exchange business in 2013 after the DOJ levied money laundering charges against the proprietors of Liberty Reserve, one of the largest virtual currencies in operation at the time.  Liberty Reserve was heavily used by cybercriminals of all stripes. The government said the service had more than a million users worldwide, and laundered in excess of $6 billion in suspected criminal proceeds.

In the days following the takedown of Liberty Reserve, KrebsOnSecurity ran a story that examined discussions across multiple top Russian cybercrime forums about where crooks could feel safe parking their stolen funds. The answer involved Bitcoin, but also Taleon’s new service.

UAPS

Part of the appeal of Taleon’s exchange was that it gave its vetted customers an “application programming interface” or API that made it simple for dodgy online shops selling stolen goods and cybercrime services to accept cryptocurrency deposits from their customers, and to manage payouts to any suppliers and affiliates.

This API is synonymous with a service Taleon and friends operate in the background called UAPS, short for “Universal Anonymous Payment System.” UAPS has gone by several other names including “Pinpays,” and in October 2014 it landed Joker’s Stash as its first big client.

A source with knowledge of the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity that Taleon is a pilot who owns and flies around in his own helicopter.

Ivanov appears to have little to no social media presence, but the 40-year-old woman he lives with in St. Petersburg does, and she has a photo on her Vktontake page that shows the two of them in 2019 flying over Lake Ladoga, a large body of water directly north of St. Petersburg.

BRIANS CLUB

In late 2015, a major competitor to Joker’s Stash emerged using UAPS for its back-end payments: BriansClub. BriansClub sullies this author’s name, photos and reputation to peddle millions of credit and debit cards stolen from merchants in the United States and around the world.

In 2019, someone hacked BriansClub and relieved the fraud shop of more than 26 million stolen payment cards — an estimated one-third of the 87 million payment card accounts that were on sale across all underground shops at that time. An anonymous source shared that card data with KrebsOnSecurity, which ultimately shared it with a consortium of financial institutions that issued most of the cards.

After that incident, the administrator of BriansClub changed the site’s login page so that it featured a copy of my phone bill, Social Security card, and a link to my full credit report [to this day, random cybercriminals confuse Yours Truly with the proprietor of BriansClub].

Alex Holden is founder of the Milwaukee-based cybersecurity firm Hold Security. Holden has long maintained visibility into cryptocurrency transactions made by BriansClub.

Holden said those records show BriansClub sells tens of thousands of dollars worth of stolen credit cards every day, and that in the last two years alone the BriansClub administrator has removed more than $242 million worth of cryptocurrency revenue from the UAPS platform.

Passive domain name system (DNS) records show that in its early days BriansClub shared a server in Lithuania along with just a handful of other domains, including secure.pinpays[.]com, the crime forum Verified, and a slew of carding shops operating under the banner Rescator.

As KrebsOnSecurity detailed in December 2023, the Rescator shops were directly involved in some of the largest payment card breaches of the past decade. Those include the 2013 breach at Target and the 2014 breach at Home Depot, intrusions that exposed more than 100 million payment card records.

CRYPTEX

In early 2018, Taleon and the proprietors of UAPS launched a cryptocurrency exchange called Cryptex[.]net that has emerged as a major mover of ill-gotten crypto coins.

Cryptex has been associated with quite a few ransomware transactions, including the largest known ransomware payment to date. In February 2024, a Fortune 50 ransomware victim paid a record $75 million ransom to a Russian cybercrime group that calls themselves the Dark Angels. A source with knowledge of the investigation said an analysis of that payment shows roughly half of it was processed through Cryptex.

That source provided a screen shot of Cryptex’s sending and receiving exposure as viewed by Chainalysis, a company the U.S. government and many cryptocurrency exchanges rely on to flag transactions associated with suspected money laundering, ransomware payouts, or facilitating payments for darknet websites.

Chainalysis finds that Cryptex has received more than $1.6 billion since its inception, and that this amount is roughly equal to its sending exposure (although the total number of outflows is nearly half of the inflows).

The graphic indicates a great deal of money flowing into Cryptex — roughly a quarter of it — is coming from bitcoin ATMs around the world. Experts say most of those ATM inflows to Cryptex are bitcoin ATM cash deposits from customers of carding websites like BriansClub and Jokers Stash.

The indictments released today do not definitively connect Taleon to Cryptex. However, PM2BTC (which teamed up with Taleon to launch UAPS and Pinpays) and Cryptex have now been sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) levied sanctions today against PM2BTC under a powerful new “Section 9714” authority included in the Combating Russian Money Laundering Act, changes enacted in 2022 to make it easier to target financial entities involved in laundering money for Russia.

Treasury first used this authority last year against Bitzlato, a cryptocurrency exchange operating in Russia that became a money laundering conduit for ransomware attackers and dark market dealers.

THE LAUNDROMAT

An investigation into the corporate entities behind UAPS and Cryptex reveals an organization incorporated in 2012 in Scotland called Orbest Investments LP. Records from the United Kingdom’s business registry show the owners of Orbest Investments are two entities: CS Proxy Solutions CY, and RM Everton Ltd.

Public business records further reveal that CS Proxy Solutions and RM Everton are co-owners of Progate Solutions, a holding company that featured prominently in a June 2017 report from Bellingcat and Transparency International (PDF) on money laundering networks tied to the Kremlin.

“Law enforcement agencies believe that the total amount laundered through this process could be as high as US$80 billion,” the joint report reads. “Although it is not clear where all of this money came from, investigators claim it includes significant amounts of money that were diverted from the Russian treasury and state contracts.”

Their story built on reporting published earlier that year by the Organized Crime and Corruption Project (OCCRP) and Novaya Gazeta, which found that at least US$20.8 billion was secretly moved out of Russia between 2010 and 2014 through a vast money laundering machine comprising over 5,000 legal entities known as “The Laundromat.”

“Using company records, reporters tracked the names of some clients after executives refused to give them out,” the OCCRP report explains. “They found the heavy users of the scheme were rich and powerful Russians who had made their fortunes from dealing with the Russian state.”

Rich Sanders is a blockchain analyst and investigator who advises the law enforcement and intelligence community. Sanders just returned from a three-week sojourn through Ukraine, traveling with Ukrainian soldiers while mapping out dodgy Russian crypto exchanges that are laundering money for narcotics networks operating in the region. Sanders said today’s sanctions by the Treasury Department will likely have an immediate impact on Cryptex and its customers.

“Whenever an entity is sanctioned, the implications on-chain are immense,” Sanders told KrebsOnSecurity. “Regardless of whether an exchange is actually compliant or just virtue signals it, it is the case across the board that exchanges will pay attention to these sanctions.”

“This action shows these payment processors for illicit platforms will get attention eventually,” Sanders continued. “Even if it took way too long in this case, Cryptex knew the majority of their volume was problematic, knew why it was problematic, and did it anyway. And this should be a wake up call for other exchanges that know full well that most of their volume is problematic.”

The U.S. Department of State is offering a reward of up to $10 million each for information leading to the arrests and/or convictions of Shakhmametov and Ivanov. The State announcement says separate rewards of up to $1 million each are being offered for information leading to the identification of other leaders of the Joker’s Stash criminal marketplace (other than Shakhmametov), as well as the identification of other key leaders of the UAPS, PM2BTC, and PinPays transnational criminal groups (other than Ivanov).

82% of all phishing sites target mobile devices, with 76% using HTTPS to appear secure

House GOP unveiled a bill to combat Chinese cyber threats to US infrastructure, led by CISA and FBI

Adam Meyers, CrowdStrike VP for counter-adversary operations, appeared before a US congressional committee to answer questions about its July faulty software update

Some 3191 email addresses for congressional staff are available on the dark web

CISA adds critical Ivanti bug to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

Clever:

A malware campaign uses the unusual method of locking users in their browser’s kiosk mode to annoy them into entering their Google credentials, which are then stolen by information-stealing malware.

Specifically, the malware “locks” the user’s browser on Google’s login page with no obvious way to close the window, as the malware also blocks the “ESC” and “F11” keyboard keys. The goal is to frustrate the user enough that they enter and save their Google credentials in the browser to “unlock” the computer.

Once credentials are saved, the StealC information-stealing malware steals them from the credential store and sends them back to the attacker.

I’m sure this works often enough to be a useful ploy.

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The FBI is warning timeshare owners to be wary of a prevalent telemarketing scam involving a violent Mexican drug cartel that tries to trick people into believing someone wants to buy their property. This is the story of a couple who recently lost more than $50,000 to an ongoing timeshare scam that spans at least two dozen phony escrow, title and realty firms.

One evening in late 2022, someone phoned Mr. & Mrs. Dimitruk, a retired couple from Ontario, Canada and asked whether they’d ever considered selling their timeshare in Florida. The person on the phone referenced their timeshare address and said they had an interested buyer in Mexico. Would they possibly be interested in selling it?

The Dimitruks had purchased the timeshare years ago, but it wasn’t fully paid off — they still owed roughly $5,000 before they could legally sell it. That wouldn’t be an issue for this buyer, the man on the phone assured them.

With a few days, their contact at a escrow company in New York called ecurrencyescrow[.]llc faxed them forms to fill out and send back to start the process of selling their timeshare to the potential buyer, who had offered an amount that was above what the property was likely worth.

After certain forms were signed and faxed, the Dimitruks were asked to send a small wire transfer of more than $3,000 to handle “administrative” and “processing” fees, supposedly so that the sale would not be held up by any bureaucratic red tape down in Mexico.

These document exchanges went on for almost a year, during which time the real estate brokers made additional financial demands, such as tax payments on the sale, and various administrative fees. Mrs. Dimitruk even sent them a $5,000 wire to pay off her remaining balance on the timeshare they thought they were selling.

In a phone interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Mr. Dimitruk said they lost over $50,000.

“They kept calling me after that saying, ‘Hey your money is waiting for you here’,” said William Dimitruk, a 73-year-old retired long-haul truck driver. “They said ‘We’re going to get in trouble if the money isn’t returned to you,’ and gave me a toll-free number to call them at.”

In the last call he had with the scammers, the man on the other end of the line confessed that some bad people had worked for them previously, but that those employees had been fired.

“Near the end of the call he said, ‘You’ve been dealing with some bad people and we fired all those bad guys,’” Dimitruk recalled. “So they were like, yeah it’s all good. You can go ahead and pay us more and we’ll send you your money.”

According to the FBI, there are indeed some very bad people behind these scams. The FBI warns the timeshare fraud schemes have been linked to the Jalisco New Generation drug cartel in Mexico.

In July 2024, the FBI and the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) warned the Jalisco cartel is running boiler room-like call centers that target people who own timeshares:

“Mexico-based [transnational criminal organizations] such as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel are increasingly targeting U.S. owners of timeshares in Mexico through complex and often yearslong telemarketing, impersonation, and advance fee schemes. They use the illicit proceeds to diversify their revenue streams and finance other criminal activities, including the manufacturing and trafficking of illicit fentanyl and other synthetic drugs into the United States.”

A July 2024 CBS News story about these scams notes that U.S. and Mexican officials last year confirmed that as many as eight young workers were confirmed dead after they apparently tried to quit jobs at a call center operated by the Jalisco cartel.

The phony escrow company the Dimitruks dealt with — ecurrencyescrow[.]llc — is no longer online. But the documents sent by their contact there referenced a few other still-active domains, including realestateassetsllc[.]com

The original registration records of both of these domains reference another domain — datasur[.]host — that is associated with dozens of other real estate and escrow-themed domains going back at least four years. Some of these domains are no longer active, while others have been previously suspended at different hosting providers.

061nyr[.]net
061-newyorkrealty[.]net
1nydevelopersgroupllc[.]com
1oceanrealtyllc[.]com
advancedclosingservicesllc[.]com
americancorporatetitle[.]com
asesorialegalsiglo[.]com
atencion-tributaria.[]com
carolinasctinc[.]net
closingandsettlementservices[.]com
closingandsettlementsllc[.]com
closingsettlementllc[.]com
crefaescrowslimited[.]net
ecurrencyescrow[.]llc
empirerllc[.]com
fiduciarocitibanamex[.]com
fondosmx[.]org
freightescrowcollc[.]com
goldmansachs-investment[.]com
hgvccorp[.]com
infodivisionfinanciera[.]com
internationaladvisorllc[.]com
jadehillrealtyllc[.]com
lewisandassociaterealty[.]com
nyreputable[.]org
privateinvestment.com[.]co
realestateassetsllc[.]com
realestateisinc[.]com
settlementandmanagement[.]com
stllcservices[.]com
stllcservices[.]net
thebluehorizonrealtyinc[.]com
walshrealtyny[.]net
windsorre[.]com

By loading ecurrencyescrowllc[.]com into the Wayback Machine at archive.org, we can see text at the top of the page that reads, “Visit our resource library for videos and tools designed to make managing your escrow disbursements a breeze.”

Searching on that bit of text at publicwww.com shows the same text appears on the website of an escrow company called Escshieldsecurity Network (escshieldsecurity[.]com). This entity claims to have been around since 2009, but the domain itself is less than two years old, and there is no contact information associated with the site. The Pennsylvania Secretary of State also has no record of a business by this name at its stated address.

Incredibly, Escshieldsecurity pitches itself as a solution to timeshare closing scams.

“By 2015, cyber thieves had realized the amount of funds involved and had targeted the real estate, title and settlement industry,” the company’s website states. “As funding became more complex and risky, agents and underwriters had little time or resources to keep up. The industry needed a simple solution that allowed it to keep pace with new funding security needs.”

The domains associated with this scam will often reference legitimate companies and licensed professionals in the real estate and closing businesses, but those real professionals often have no idea they’re being impersonated until someone starts asking around. The truth is, the original reader tip that caused KrebsOnSecurity to investigate this scheme came from one such professional whose name and reputation was being used to scam others.

It is unclear whether the Dimitruks were robbed by people working for the Jalisco cartel, but it is clear that whoever is responsible for managing many of the above-mentioned domains — including the DNS provider datasur[.]host — recently compromised their computer with information-stealing malware.

That’s according to data collected by the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence [Constella is currently an advertiser on KrebsOnSecurity]. Constella found that someone using the email address exposed in the DNS records for datasur[.]host — jyanes1920@gmail.com — also was relieved of credentials for managing most of the domains referenced above at a Mexican hosting provider.

It’s not unusual for victims of such scams to keep mum about their misfortune. Sometimes, it’s shame and embarrassment that prevents victims from filing a report with the local authorities. But in this case, victims who learn they’ve been robbed by a violent drug cartel have even more reason to remain silent.

William Dimitruk acknowledged that he and his wife haven’t yet filed a police report. But after acknowledging it could help prevent harm to other would-be victims, Mr. Dimitruk said he would consider it.

There is another reason victims of scams like this should notify authorities: Occasionally, the feds will bust up one of these scam operations and seize funds that were stolen from victims. But those investigations can take years, and it can be even more years before the government starts trying to figure out who got scammed and how to remunerate victims. All too often, the real impediment to returning some of those losses is that the feds have no idea who the victims are.

If you are the victim of a timeshare scam like this, please consider filing a report with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), at ic3.gov. Other places where victims may wish to file a complaint:

Federal Trade Commission – https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov
International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network – https://www.econsumer.gov/en
Profeco – Mexican Attorney General – https://consulmex.sre.gob.mx/montreal/index.php/en/foreigners/services-foreigners/318-consumer-protection

Cybercriminals are increasingly prioritizing script-based phishing techniques over one based on traditional malicious documents