Who are the two Russian convicts released in the US-Russia prisoner swap?

In what is being lauded as a historic feat, the Biden administration, on Thursday, concluded a prisoner swap with the Kremlin, as part of an exchange deal that involved five other countries.

The deal allowed the White House to bring home 16 US citizens from Russia, including three journalists, in exchange for Russian citizens detained in the US on cybercriminal charges.

The two convicted Russians — Roman Seleznev and Vladislav Klyushin — are both notorious for running extensive cybercrime operations on US soil and had to be released as part of the prisoner-swap deal.

Seleznev cost the US about $170 million

Seleznev, also known by his hacker name Track2, is the son of a prominent Russian lawmaker, Valery Seleznev, and was arrested in July 2014 in the Maldives, and subsequently extradited to the US, for his involvement in cybercrime activities.

The crimes Seleznev was convicted of included hacking and data theft, credit card fraud, identity theft, and racketeering. His biggest offense was hacking into point-of-sale computers to steal credit card numbers and sell them on dark market websites.

The now forty-year-old hacker had stolen, as authorities found from his laptop, more than 1.7 million credit cards from more than 500 US businesses and had sent the data to servers that he controlled in Russia, Ukraine, and McLean, Virginia.

“Many of the businesses targeted by Seleznev were small businesses, and included restaurants and pizza parlors in Western Washington, including Broadway Grill in Seattle, which was forced into bankruptcy following the cyber assault,” said the US Department of Justice (DoJ) in an April 2017 statement. “Testimony at trial revealed that Seleznev’s scheme caused approximately 3,700 financial institutions more than $169 million in losses.”

Seleznev was sentenced to 27 years in prison for hacking and the credit card fraud scheme.

Klyushin was linked to cyber-espionage

Vladislav Klyushin is a Russian businessman who was arrested for his involvement in a major financial crime. Specifically, he was arrested in Switzerland in March 2021 and later extradited to the US to face charges.

The crimes Klyushin was charged with include hacking and insider trading activities. Klyushin and his co-conspirators allegedly engaged in an extensive insider trading scheme. They are accused of hacking into the networks of US companies to obtain non-public information about the earnings and financial performance of various publicly traded companies.

Klyushin’s lawyer later argued that the insider trading charge was fabricated as a pretext to bring him to the US, where he would be pressured for information on the Russian government’s “Fancy Bear” operation, which aimed to influence the 2016 US presidential election. On February 14, 2023, Klyushin was found guilty by a federal jury of conspiracy, wire fraud, and securities fraud.