1. PROBLEMA
1.2 PREGUNTA DE INVESTIGACIÓN
4.1.7 El Papel del Emprendedor Social
“You have to give Citibank a pat on the back for doing the right thing,” Stroz remarks. “They found it; they worked on it. They could just have filled out a suspicious activ- ity report a month after they heard about it. They are obligated to do that by law. But they called the Bureau before they even filled out the form. They worked together with the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office to get this guy.”
Stroz also stressed the contributions of the lead investigator, FBI Special Agent Steve Garfinkel, and the lead prosecutor, Dietrich Snell, then an assistant U.S. attorney, now with the New York State Attorney General’s Office.
“It was a tiny, tight team,” Stroz explains. “They brought the kind of judgment and support to each other that allowed a case like this to get done.
“It isn’t like a checklist you could hand to somebody,” he says. “It takes a talented ball player to pull off some of these plays. You can tell somebody else what to do, ‘Run over there, turn, spin, and catch the ball.’ But there’s only a handful of people who can actually do it well. People don’t appreciate or respect the kind of judgment that goes into this kind of case.”
That authorities managed to apprehend Levin in London “is a part of the puzzle that can’t be laid out in great detail,” Stroz explains. “They were able to persuade Levin to travel to London. And once he was there, they were able to apprehend him. It took a combination of some finesse, some fact, and some cooperation. There were cooper- ators involved in this case. People who have access to other people and who are coop- erating with law enforcement either out of the goodness of their hearts or because they are jammed up big time.
“You put all that on the table and try to come up with a plan of action that’s going to work,” Stroz continues. “When Levin went to London, people wondered, ‘Well, gee, did the Russians put a gun to his head? Did they strap him in and tell him he was going to go into obligatory military service?’ None of that was in play. It was actually something that required a lot more judgment skill and finesse.”
Suffice it to say that Levin was very surprised when he was arrested.
There is some irony in regard to the technological challenges involved in the Citibank case. You might imagine that the investigation required some world-class, cutting- edge cybercrime expertise. Well, as Stroz explains, the reality was quite the opposite. “As we trailed back through the telecommunications systems in order to find out where the origination point for this trouble was,” Stroz explains, “we wound up snaking from the U.S. into Russia. In these high-tech cases, the first thing people think they need is the country’s best brains and most up-to-date minds in terms of optical switching, etc. But when we really got into the devil’s territory in this case, we were looking at mechanical switches, twisted pair, labels written in the Cyrillic alphabet, all kinds of wacky stuff.”
Stroz says that “the skill set needed to find the originating point for these transmis- sions was not going to be aided by bringing in the top experts in the current state of the technology. Nor was banking expertise what we needed to track Levin down. What we needed were telecommunications experts, and quite specifically we needed telecom experts who were relevant to the technology in place over there, which was decades old. We needed blueprint analysis in another language. It was really a
telecommunications chore more than anything else. It wasn’t one that demanded cutting-edge understanding. Indeed, using a primitive network in some ways aided Levin, not that he had a choice.”
Sprint was the telecommunications service that Citibank was using at the time, so Sprint was able to answer a lot of questions. “Here is a data stream that came in via telephone lines,” Citibank asked, “what can you tell me about who initiated it?” Sprint didn’t build the Russian telecommunications infrastructure. Sprint technicians fol- lowed the trail through the telephone lines on a trap-and-trace basis, working an anti- quated technology, with technicians who speak a different language and use a different alphabet. Consequently, they depended heavily on the Russian police to talk with the people who run the telecom system.
The fraudulent transactions were traced all the way to the phone in the house where Levin lived in St. Petersburg. Table 7.1 details the transactions in counts 3–21 against Levin.
Table 7.1
Timeline of Vladimir Levin’s Citibank Cyber-Heists
Date Wire Transmission
6/30/94 Transfer of $143,800 from an account held by PNB at Citibank
in New York, New York, to the Carmane account
7/15/94 Transfer of $384,000 from an account held by CFI at Citibank
in New York, New York, to the Carmane account
8/5/94 Transfer of $218,000 from an account held by Artha Graha at
Citibank in New York, New York, to an account held by Primorye (USA) Corp. at Bank of America in San Francisco, California
8/5/94 Transfer of $304,000 from an account held by SUD at Citibank
in New York, New York, to an account held by Shore Co. at Bank of America in San Francisco, California
8/23/94 Transfer of $983,770 from an account held by Alberta at
Citibank in New York, New York, to an account held by Auto Rik Import-Export at ABN-AMRO Bank in the Netherlands
8/23/94 Transfer of $73,215 from the BCO account to an account held
by Oy Finn Enterprise Ltd. at KOP in Finland
8/23/94 Transfer of $208,600 from the BCO account to an account
held by Damir Chadaev at the Deutsche Bank in Germany
8/23/94 Transfer of $194,511 from the BCO account to an account held by Serguei Vassiliev at KOP in Finland
8/24/94 Transfer of $191,300 from an account held by Toepffer at
Citibank in New York, New York, to an account held by Damir Chadaev at the Union Bank of Finland in Finland
8/24/94 Transfer of $31,200 from the Invest Capital account to an
account held by Ekaterina Korolkova at Sumitomo Bank in San Francisco, California
8/24/94 Transfer of $49,300 from the Invest Capital account to an
account held by Ekaterina Korolkova at Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco, California
8/24/94 Transfer of $26,800 from the Invest Capital account to an
account held by Ekaterina Korolkova at Union Bank in San Francisco, California
8/24/94 Transfer of $53,200 from the Invest Capital account to an
account held by Ekaterina Korolkova at Great Western Bank in San Francisco, California
8/24/94 Transfer of $32,800 from the Invest Capital account to an
account held by Ekaterina Korolkova at Pacific Bank in San Francisco, California
8/24/94 Transfer of $197,630 from the LAIB account to an account held
by Alexios Palmidis at American Israel Bank Ltd. in Tel Aviv
8/24/94 Transfer of $181,000 from the LAIB account to an account
held by Alexios Palmidis at Union Bank of Israel in Tel Aviv
8/24/94 Transfer of $198,900 from the LAIB account to an account
held by Alexios Palmidis at First International Bank of Israel in Tel Aviv
8/24/94 Transfer of $174,000 from the LAIB account to an account held
by Alexios Palmidis at Israel Discount Bank Ltd. in Tel Aviv
8/24/94 Transfer of $188,300 from the LAIB account to an account held
by Alexios Palmidis at Israel Continental Bank Ltd. in Tel Aviv
Source: United States of America v. Vladimir Leonidovich Levin, a.k.a. Vova, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.