#7 - Hakan Ayik
Born in Australia to Turkish parents in 1979, Hakan Ayik had a checkered childhood marred by the
death of his father, rampant drug addiction within his immediate family, and his cousin and brother,
at one point, being sent to prison. By the early 2000s, Ayik was operating a large-scale criminal
empire that was said to have close ties to the Comanchero Motorcycle Gang. His various
illegal exploits included drug importation, cooperation with the Sam Gor Chinese Triad,
as well as partnering with corrupt customs officials and jail officers in Australia and
Tonga. In 2010, Ayik became known as the “Facebook Gangster” because of his proclivity to flaunt the
trappings of his lavish lifestyle on social media. The man became the subject of an Interpol red
notice in August of that year, and after briefly being taken into custody in Cyprus, he fled from
justice upon posting bail. As he furthered his illicit endeavors, Ayik garnered a reputation as
a prolific cyber criminal, and was attributed with introducing the encrypted communications platform,
Phantom Secure, to the world of organized crime. In 2018, the cyber-security company was shut down
by the FBI and Australian Federal Police. In Ayik’s subsequent attempt to find a new
encrypted messaging app for him and his criminal constituents, he inadvertently aided the FBI in
what became known as the ANOM sting operation. An undercover agent had reportedly given
Ayik access to a bait platform, known as ANOM, which had a backdoor intentionally
installed for American and Australian law enforcement. Believing the app to be legitimate,
the notorious cyber criminal distributed it to his contacts, which ultimately led to the arrests of
more than 800 suspects across 16 countries. In the wake of the ANOM fiasco, which reportedly
caused Ayik to become a target of certain members of the international criminal element, he moved to
Turkey, where he began operating the Kings Cross Hotel in Istanbul. He’s allegedly taken steps to
distance himself from his previous Facebook Gangster persona, having undergone plastic
surgery to alter his facial appearance. Ayik, who was described as Australia’s most wanted man,
has an estimated net worth of approximately $1.5 billion. As of the latest updates on the matter,
Ayik had been indicted by the FBI as part of a RICO conspiracy case, which,
if he were to be convicted, would result in him being sent to prison for up to 20 years.
#6 - GozNym Criminal Network
In May of 2019, the FBI, along with other global law enforcement partners, apprehended a so-called
“cyber kingpin”, who masterminded a malware scam in an attempt to steal upwards of $100 million.
A Justice Department press release detailed how Alexander Konovolov and his alleged accomplice,
Marat Kazandjian, had used GozNym malware to hack into Windows PCs and obtain people’s bank
account information. The GozNym software reportedly infected computers belonging
to tens of thousands of victims worldwide, primarily in the US and Europe. The cyber
criminal network had initially been formed after Konovolov and Kazandjian “advertised
their specialized technical skills and services on underground Russian-language criminal forums”. In
addition to the 2 main suspects, 5 Russian hackers were alleged to have taken part in
the multi-million dollar scheme, but as of subsequent updates, they remained at large.
#5 - Ruja Ignatova
Bulgarian-German fraudster Ruja Ignatova gained international notoriety for perpetrating the Ponzi
scheme known as OneCoin, described as “one of the biggest scams in history”. Ignatova
started OneCoin back in 2014, promoting it as a cryptocurrency that was centralized on servers
hosted by a Bulgaria-based offshore company in Dubai. The business’ primary method of generating
revenue was the sale of educational material for trading. The packages offered to members ranged
in price from $100 to over $200,000, according to one industry blog. The contents of OneCoin’s
educational literature was said to have been more than questionable, as they allegedly plagiarized
numerous other sources. Ignatova’s company attracted suspicions from international law
enforcement almost instantly, as she’d previously been given a suspended jail sentence in connection
to a financial fraud she’d committed with her father in 2012. The following year,
she’d gotten involved with a multi-level marketing scam called BigCoin, before founding her purported
cryptocurrency venture a year later. In 2017, Ignatova vanished, shortly after arrest warrants
were filed in secret for her and her brother, Konstantin. Following her sudden disappearance,
Konstantin took over his cyber criminal sister’s position as the head of OneCoin, before ultimately
being taken into custody, along with Sebastian Greenwood, another of the company’s executives.
Prosecutors claimed that OneCoin had brought in upwards of $4 billion in illegally obtained funds
while it was in operation. Konstantin eventually pleaded guilty to charges of money laundering and
fraud, while Ignatova herself remained on the run. The woman was charged in absentia for wire fraud,
securities fraud and money laundering, and in the summer of 2022, was added to the FBI’s Most
Wanted List. Ignatova was last seen boarding a flight from Bulgaria to Greece in 2017,
and as of the latest developments, her current whereabouts were still unknown.
#4 - International ATM Heist
In early 2016, Europol began investigating a European-based cyber criminal gang suspected of
stealing millions of dollars from ATMs through the use of malware. The following year, law
enforcement entities from Europe and Asia arrested 5 alleged members of the group, which had swindled
approximately $3 million from 22 individuals across 6 different countries. It was detailed
how the cyber criminals had used “phishing emails containing malicious attachments to target bank
employees and penetrate the internal networks” of the financial institutions they victimized. The
gang then hacked into the ATM networks, siphoned the money from unsuspecting patrons’ accounts,
and used malware to delete all traces of their activities. Three of the gangsters,
Andrejs Peregudovs, Niklae Penkov, and Mihail Colibaba, were taken into the custody of the
Taiwanese Criminal Investigation Bureau, and faced sentences of 5 years in prison for the
predatory scheme. One of the remaining suspects was arrested by the Romanian National Police,
while the other was detained by the Belarusian Central Office of the Investigative Committee.
A court decreed that the individuals involved in the international cyber heist would be extradited
back to their native countries following the conclusion of their prison terms.
#3 - Andy Castillo
On January the 6th of 2020, the police in Lubbock, Texas arrested a man accused of targeting children
in a cyber-stalking operation. The suspect, Andy Castillo, who was in his 50s at the time,
contacted about a half dozen female real estate agents from the Waco area. He allegedly sent the
victims explicit photographs as well as pictures of their children that he’d taken from social
media sites with graphic descriptions of inappropriate acts being performed
on them. Castillo used encrypted messaging apps to conceal the phone numbers from which
the threatening texts were sent. Investigators indicated that the man eventually slipped up,
allowing authorities to identify him as the cyber stalker. He was taken into custody on charges of
criminal solicitation to commit aggravated assault of a child and third-degree felony
stalking. Following his arrest, Castillo’s DNA was uploaded to a national law enforcement database,
which led to him being identified as a suspect in 2 previously unsolved murder cases. In 2003,
the partially unclothed body of Cynthia Palacio had been found along a rural road in Lubbock. The
following year, a second woman, Linda Carbajal, was found dead on a dirt road in northern Lubbock
County. The authorities matched evidence recovered from the original crime scenes to Castillo’s DNA,
and he was consequently indicted for capital murder. While awaiting trial, Castillo was found
dead in his jail cell after reportedly succumbing to complications stemming from COVID-19.
Today’s topic was requested by Tara Rose. If you have any other topics you’d like
to learn about subscribe and let us know in the comments section below.
#2 - Zain Qaiser
A prolific cyber criminal infected hundreds of millions of computers with ransomware between
September of 2012 and December of 2018, when he was remanded into custody after a National Crime
Agency investigation. 24-year-old Zain Qaiser was an alleged member of a Russian-speaking
organized crime group that unleashed a campaign of malware and blackmail on victims from more
than 20 different countries around the world. For his role in the scheme, Qaiser was said to
have collected at least $800,000, although the exact figure is thought to be much higher. He
used the illegally obtained funds to bankroll an extravagant lifestyle replete with luxury hotel
stays, high-end escorts, drugs, and big-money gambling excursions. Qaiser reportedly targeted
prospective victims by purchasing mass quantities of advertising traffic on adult film websites. He
used fake identities and fraudulent companies to make it appear as though he worked for a
legitimate online advertising agency. When users clicked on the ads created by the cyber
crime group, they’d be redirected to a website hosting a “highly-sophisticated” malware strain
that would infect any vulnerable devices. Those who found themselves victimized by the predatory
ads would then be blackmailed by Qaiser and his criminal associates. The gang requested ransom
payment through a virtual currency that would then be “laundered by way of an international
network of illegitimate financial service providers”. Qaiser pleaded guilty to 11 counts,
including blackmail, fraud, money laundering and computer misuse. Following a sentencing hearing
at Kingston Crown Court, the hacker was jailed for 6 years and 5 months.
#1 - Jeremy Hammond
In 2003, Chicago teen Jeremy Hammond founded the computer security training website HackThisSite,
which described itself as “a non-profit organization aimed at protecting a good security
culture and learning atmosphere”. Two years later, Hammond was involved in a joint effort to hack the
pro-war political activist group Protest Warrior. As part of the cyber attack, the hacker accessed
thousands of credit card numbers. Although no unauthorized charges were made with the illegally
obtained information, Hammond was sent to prison for 2 years for the crime. The young man’s second
run-in with law enforcement came in 2013, when he was arrested on computer fraud charges for
hacking the private geopolitical intelligence company Stratfor and releasing confidential
data to WikiLeaks. Hammond’s cyber attacks reportedly victimized not only the firm itself,
but also other law enforcement agencies and “thousands of innocent individuals”. Despite
his reputation as one of the world’s premiere hackers, Hammond later told the Associated
Press that the FBI was able to track him down because he used a “really weak password”. The
password in question was Chewy123, in reference to his cat, named Chewy. Hammond consequently
faced a 10-year prison term, of which he served 7 years before his release in November of 2020.
Thanks for watching! Would you rather learn that each of your
Internet passwords was being distributed across the dark web or be forced to remove
all of the locks from your home? Let us know in the comments section below!