When Karim Baratov said on Facebook he’d paid off a mortgage and drove a BMW 7 series at high school, classmates thought he had rich parents. The money may have come, instead, from a secret life as a cyber hacker, including work for Russia’s top spy agency.
The U.S. government indicted four people Wednesday for allegedly hacking Yahoo! Inc. accounts for the Russian government. Baratov, a Canadian born in Kazakhstan who is 22 years old now, is the only one likely to see trial.
He was arrested Tuesday and appeared in court in Hamilton, Ontario, a steel town an hour’s drive west of Toronto. After a couple of preliminary court appearances, a Canadian judge will decide whether to extradite him to the U.S. to face a trial that will have ramifications for U.S.-Russian relations and shed light on how well Yahoo! Inc. dealt with security threats to its popular email service.
“Absolutely crazy. Wouldn’t have imagined this happening,” said Dillon Kovljenic, who became friends with Baratov while doing work on some of his cars over the last two years.
In the indictment, Baratov’s jet-black Mercedes Benz C54 and Aston Martin DBS (complete with "Mr. Karim" vanity plate) are listed as assets that the U.S. is seeking to seize, arguing they were obtained through illegal activity.
Baratov is charged with working for Dmitry Dokuchaev, a hacker for hire who was pressed into working with Russia’s FSB security service to avoid prosecution for bank-card fraud. The Canadian used fake emails to lure targets to give up sensitive information that allowed him to get passwords, which he then sold to Dokuchaev for $100 each, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Baratov was quiet and soft-spoken as he answered a judge’s questions in court on Wednesday. He wore a black winter coat buttoned up to his throat, black pants and brown-rimmed glasses. His bail hearing was pushed back to Mar. 17 because his legal counsel wasn’t present.
It’s unclear whether he knew he was working for the FSB, though the indictment said Dokuchaev and a colleague Igor Sushchin told him to hack into private accounts owned by Russian politicians and bureaucrats. Baratov was asked to hack into at least 80 email accounts, including 50 Google accounts, the indictment said.
Text messages sent to Baratov’s cell phone and a call to his home weren’t answered. Amedeo DiCarlo, a criminal defense lawyer, said he had been retained by Baratov’s family to defend him. He declined to comment on the case.
’Great Guy’