He was a young man with a big plan: taking aim at rich Americans, with the help of the Forbes 400 list, and robbing their financial accounts by trolling the Internet for information all the way from his base in Moscow, prosecutors in Manhattan said yesterday.
The man, Igor Klopov, 24, hired confederates in the United States to help with the execution of his plan, prosecutors said.
Those confederates, whom he found by posting job advertisements through Web sites like Monster.com, were promised cash, stays at five-star hotels and travel in limousines, prosecutors said.
Mr. Klopov and his accomplices almost succeeded, law enforcement officials said, having stolen $1.5 million from four victims before his lust for wealth and an attempt to steal $10.7 million more led him to two truly big fish, who proved his undoing.
The big fish were Anthony Pritzker, president of Trans Union Credit and a member of the Chicago family that founded Hyatt hotels, and Charles Wyly Jr., a Texas entrepreneur who, with his brother, Sam, is a Republican Party benefactor with close ties to President Bush. Mr. Pritzker is ranked No. 160 on the 2006 Forbes list of the richest Americans, with an estimated net worth of $2 billion.
Mr. Pritzker and Mr. Wyly, however, did not get scammed. They were, according to James Kindler, chief assistant for the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, saved by what Mr. Kindler called “alert bankers.”
Unbeknown to Mr. Klopov, his plan began to unravel as early as last November, according to officials.
At that time, one of Mr. Klopov’s accomplices used fake documents in the name of Mr. Pritzker and tried to withdraw money from a Manhattan branch of Chase Bank, but was unsuccessful when bankers contacted law enforcement officials, who were already investigating the ring.
Around the same time, Mr. Klopov, pretending to be Mr. Wyly, contacted Chase Bank and ordered a checkbook sent to a new address in Texas, which was connected to an accomplice, officials said. The accomplice then sent a check for $7 million from Mr. Wyly’s account to a gold dealer in Westchester for the purchase of gold bars. The gold dealer contacted the bank to verify the check’s authenticity. The bank contacted Mr. Wyly, who said he had never signed such a check.
The district attorney’s office in Manhattan joined federal Secret Service agents in hatching a plan to bring Mr. Klopov to the United States by arranging for an undercover agent who had infiltrated Mr. Klopov’s ring to deliver the gold bars to him. Mr. Klopov met undercover agents from the New York police and the Secret Service in the Dominican Republic and traveled with them by private plane to New York.
So instead of buying gold, Mr. Klopov was arrested on May 15 while touring the sights, as undercover agents photographed him near the River Café in Brooklyn against the backdrop of the Brooklyn Bridge and New York’s financial district, prosecutors said. He has pleaded not guilty to multiple counts of conspiracy, grand larceny, attempted grand larceny, money laundering, identity theft, forgery and other crimes, and is being held without bail at Rikers Island.
His lawyer, Arkady Bukh, said yesterday in a telephone interview that Mr. Klopov — who has four co-defendants who were arrested yesterday in Texas, Florida, Kentucky and Michigan — was interested in cooperating with prosecutors. “Our position is to assist the government and we are hoping to get a positive plea deal from the prosecutor,” Mr. Bukh said. The district attorney in New York will seek extradition of the four co-defendants.
Mr. Bukh said Mr. Klopov was a graduate of Moscow University who had never been to the United States before, and whose girlfriend and family back in Moscow were very worried about him. He also complained that Mr. Klopov had been “entrapped” into entering the United States by the Secret Service, which he said had — unbeknown to his client — chartered the plane from the Dominican Republic.
Barbara Thompson, a spokeswoman for the district attorney, declined to comment on whether the Secret Service had chartered the plane, but said, “He was in very good spirits when he was having his picture taken in front of the World Financial Center. This was not a man who was kidnapped, this was a man who willingly came to us to get his $7 million in gold.”
He was charged with stealing $1.5 million and trying to steal an additional $10.7 million. The indictment names more than a dozen victims, though some were the victims not of financial theft but of identity theft. Mr. Klopov is accused of using stolen identities to carry out the larger financial scheme.
Prosecutors said yesterday that Mr. Klopov was self-taught in the art of Internet identity theft and had used a combination of Internet smarts and old-fashioned techniques like forging driver’s licenses, powers of attorney and funds transfer request forms, hiring private investigators and using accomplices to assume the identities of victims.
By Anemona Hartocollis
www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/nyregion/17theft.html
