The U.S. court began to consider the case of Russian Vladimir Zdorovenin, arrested in Zurich on March 10, 2011 on charges of computer fraud, identity theft and illegal securities fraud.
He was extradited from Switzerland to the United States this week.
On Tuesday night, Zdorovenin, 54, was led into a small room on the fifth floor of a Manhattan federal courthouse for his initial arraignment. He is being represented free of charge by renowned attorney Sabrina Shroff, who was the first defense attorney for Russian Viktor Bout before he hired Albert Dayan.
The proceeding took only 10 minutes and will continue Thursday morning under Judge Paul Gardephey, who is assigned the case. The tall, thin Zdorovenin identified himself as a doctor of science and said he spoke English, but he was provided a court interpreter, Nelly Alishaeva, just in case.
One of them, Stanislav Satarinov, was arrested at an American request in November 2010 in Germany and extradited to the United States last April 14. He has since been awaiting trial for conspiracy to sell cocaine in a Tampa, Florida jail.
The other was Zdorovenin, whose case was filed in New York back in 2007. Accused along with him is his son Kirill, who is on the run.
Prosecutors’ Charges
In connection with Zdorovenin’s extradition from Switzerland, the federal prosecutor’s office for the Southern District of New York released the text of a 24-page indictment in his case.
According to the document, sitting in Moscow, father and son Zdorovenin registered Sofeco LLC, Pintado LLC, Tallit LLC, Novitex Corp. and Rauna Ltd. in the United States in the mid-2000s and opened their accounts at JP Morgan Chase and Asia Europe America’s Bank. These companies offered goods advertised on their websites. Customers paid with credit cards.
Vladimir Zdorovenin also controlled Rim Investment Management, which had an account at the popular brokerage firm Ameritrade, Inc. through which Rim traded stocks on the stock exchange.
According to prosecutors, between March 2004 and March 2005, the Zdorovenins carried out a fraudulent operation in which hundreds of thousands of dollars were fraudulently stolen from a large number of U.S. citizens. Specifically, from April through July 2004, their Sofeco, Pintado and Tallit bank accounts received payments illegally made through credit cards without their owners’ knowledge.
According to the prosecutor’s office, the defendants bought these credit card numbers from persons who had obtained them illegally. They also obtained these numbers with the help of special programs that were secretly installed in other people’s computers and read confidential information when they were entered there by the victims. This information then went to Zdorovenin, the prosecution claims.
The defendants allegedly transferred the stolen money to the account of their company Novitex, and then to the account of their corporation Lemery Group Ltd. at Lateko Bank in Riga.
142 years in prison?
Between June 2004 and February 2005, the Zdorovenins allegedly used the brokerage accounts of a number of American victims and without their knowledge transferred, or attempted to transfer, hundreds of thousands of dollars into the accounts of their aforementioned companies.
Prosecutors also allege that from January through February 2005, the Zdorovenins manipulated the stock of a number of companies. They allegedly secretly used the victims’ brokerage accounts to buy up large quantities of a company’s stock at one time, inflating its price, and then selling it at a profit through an Ameritrade brokerage firm.
The court documents include references to mysterious meetings in Limassol, Cyprus, unnamed associates of the Zdorovenins, and transfers of tens of thousands of dollars to certain FBI operational accounts. The latter apparently indicates that the defendants were under surveillance by U.S. law enforcement officials for some time.
According to calculations of the prosecutor’s office, Zdorovenin Sr. faces up to 142 years in prison, although in reality we are talking about a much shorter term.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/russian/international/2012/01/120115_zdorovenin_arrested_us_court