Pyotr Levashov appeared to be just another comfortable member of Russia’s rising middle class — an information technology entrepreneur with a taste for upmarket restaurants, Thai massages and foreign travel.
Then police raided his vacation rental in Barcelona, marching him out in handcuffs to face charges of being one of the world’s most notorious spam lords.
Levashov’s April 7 arrest was one in a series of US-initiated operations over the past year to seize alleged Russian cybercriminals outside their homeland, which has no extradition agreement with the US.
Illustration: Mountain people
They come at a fraught moment in relations between Moscow and Washington, where politicians are grappling with the allegation that Kremlin hackers intervened in last year’s election to help US President Donald Trump.
Through their lawyers, several defendants have suggested their arrests are linked to the election turmoil.
Experts have said that is possible, although an Associated Press review of the cases found no firm evidence to back the claim.
“There is a big hunt underway,” said Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the Russian security services and coauthor of Red Web, a book about Russian attempts to control the Internet.
He said the recent burst of arrests made it look like the US was “trying to understand what’s going on with a very complicated world of Russian hacking and a very complicated relationship between Russian hackers and Russian secret services.”
However, Soldatov did not rule out another possible explanation: The imprisoned Russians might be falsely tying their arrests to Trump’s election in a bid to sow confusion and politicize their cases.
“It’s a very big question,” he said.
At least five Russians have been picked up in Europe as part of US cybercrime prosecutions in the past nine months.
Evgeny Nikulin, 29, was arrested in a restaurant in Prague in October last year, accused of hacking into LinkedIn and Dropbox at about the time that tens of millions of users there were compromised.
Stanislav Lisov, 31, the alleged developer of the NeverQuest financial data-stealing software, was detained at the airport in Barcelona, Spain, during his honeymoon in January.
Yury Martyshev, 35, accused of helping run a service that let cybercriminals test-drive their malicious software, was recently extradited to the US after being pulled off a train at the Russian-Latvian border in April.
On Tuesday last week, Alexander Vinnik, 38, was arrested at his hotel in Greece on charges of running a money laundering ring for hackers that processed billions of dollars in digital currency.
Levashov, who made his first court appearance in Madrid for a brief hearing on Wednesday last week, is easily the best known of the five.
The 36-year-old is charged with fraud and unauthorized interception of electronic communications, but his spamming career is said to stretch back to the turn of the millennium, when the business of stuffing e-mail inboxes full of pitches for cut-price pills and penny stocks was still largely unregulated.
Court documents trace how Levashov, using the alias Peter Severa, teamed up in 2005 with Alan Ralsky, an American bulk e-mail baron once dubbed the “King of Spam.”
Ralsky described the Russian as a master of his trade.
“He made me look like an amateur,” Ralsky said in an interview. “He got to every mailbox there ever was.”
Spammers can make a lot of money renting out their services to those peddling gray market pharmaceuticals or pornography.
Ralsky said Levashov was pulling in “more money than you could shake a stick at” and traveled widely, saying that he remembered getting vacation snaps of the Russian enjoying himself at a fishing cabin in Finland or the famously expensive Burj al-Arab hotel in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
By then, Levashov had crossed US law enforcement’s radar.
In 2007, he was indicted under his Severa alias as part of the case where Ralsky and several associates pleaded guilty to charges including wire fraud and mail fraud.
Two years later, US authorities identified Levashov by name as the operator of the “Storm” botnet, a massive network of compromised, spam-spewing computers.
In the Russian hacker community, Levashov’s profile was rising too. In online forums, he promoted the idea of collaborating with Russia’s spy services, Soldatov said, adding that Levashov spearheaded an effort to knock out Web sites linked to Muslim insurgencies in southern Russia.
“He was the first Russian hacker known to have brought the FSB into the circle of the Russian hacking community,” Soldatov said, referring to Russia’s domestic spy agency, the Federal Security Service. “His idea was to make it more patriotic.”
When Levashov was finally caught, his wife Maria drew international attention when she was quoted as saying the arrest was “linked to Trump’s win.”
However, in a conversation with the AP in Madrid on Wednesday, she pulled back from those comments.
“I think there are some political reasons in this case, but I’m not sure,” she said. “I don’t have any evidence.”
Levashov’s lawyer, Margarita Repina, offered a similar qualification to her assertion that US officials were “just taking hackers with any excuse to see if any of them admits involvement in the Trump issue.”
“This is just an opinion,” she said. “We have no evidence.”
Legal documents suggest that the latest effort to catch Levashov began well before the election.
In a sworn declaration, FBI agent Elliott Petersen said he began tracking Kelihos, the latest incarnation of Levashov’s alleged spam botnet operation, more than two years ago.
The former spam king was also skeptical that Levashov’s arrest was linked to the vote.
“They’ve been after him for a long time,” Ralsky said.
Levashov would not be alone in floating thinly supported claims that his prosecution is related to last year’s US presidential election. Lisov was also arrested in Barcelona and spent a month as Levashov’s cellmate in Madrid.
His attorney, Juan Manuel Arroyo, told an extradition hearing that there was “a game of chess that escapes us” between Moscow and Washington.
Arroyo suggested that the US extradition request was “not normal.”
A Spanish court document seen by the AP suggests Lisov has been sought by the US since Aug. 5, 2015, undermining the idea of an election link.
Arroyo said he disputes the existence of any such request.
Nikulin, who is the subject of a conflicting extradition request from Russia, has been the most explicit.
He told a judge in Prague that he was twice taken out of prison and offered a pardon, US citizenship and refuge for his parents if he confessed to having “hacked the Democratic Party” on the Russian government’s orders, an apparent reference to the embarrassing leak of Democratic National Committee e-mails in the heat of the US race.
Nikulin said he rejected the offer, and his lawyer, Vladimir Makeev, later wrote a rambling letter warning Trump that the bureau was railroading Nikulin to undermine his presidency.
In an interview at his office in Moscow, Makeev said his client was being pressured by “certain unscrupulous representatives of the FBI that wish to have an impeachment carried out on president of the United States.”
There is little evidence for the inflammatory claim.
Nikulin was in fact questioned in the presence of an FBI agent from the bureau’s San Francisco office, according to a Russian-language legal document that Makeev shared with the AP.
However, there is no indication that the agent — who was one of 10 officials, translators and defense lawyers listed as being present at the interrogation — ever discussed the election or made Nikulin an offer, much less of citizenship.
The FBI would not make the agent available for an interview, but a law enforcement official said no such deal was ever discussed. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Martyshev’s attorney did not return messages seeking comment, but the Russian pleaded not guilty to all charges at a court hearing in Alexandria, Virginia, early last month.
Levashov might soon be joining him in the US.
His extradition seems a foregone conclusion, Repina said.
She argued that would hardly be fair given that, in Russia, the spamming he’s alleged to have carried out might not even be a crime.
“In his country, Levashov has legal businesses and a family that he needs to provide for,” she said. “He is a patriot.”
Additional reporting by Diego Torres, Ahmad Katib, Eric Tucker and Karel Janicek.
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