#10
Moscow News
May 21-27, 2003
Russian Scam without Borders
The interests of the Russian mafia in the U.S. range from the dating industry to ATM cards
By Ilya Baranikas

The Internet has just about everything under the sun. This includes a special Web site that warns Americans who want to get a Russian wife: Beware of con artists from the FSU!

The site is called Russian Scam (http:/www.russian-scam.org/). The site's hosts say their aim is to protect individuals seeking family happiness from swindlers operating international dating services.

The Heart Has a Will of Its Own

To this end, companies providing legal dating, introduction, matchmaking or marriage services - or pimping, to put it bluntly - that deal with CIS countries are invited to join the Anti-Scam Program: Then their clients will see immediately that they are bona fide operations. To those Americans who search for a soul-mate in Eurasia, the Anti-Scam Program offers (for $24.95) an anti-scam manual on how to protect themselves against Russian scam.

Furthermore, a vast rogue gallery of attractive female cheats is available free of charge - complete with their enticing snapshots and personal details. What they all have in common is that first they declare their love for a prospective partner across the ocean and then ask to wire money through Western Union, which is apparently the most reliable vehicle. Once they get the money, they quickly fall out of love and stop writing.

Recently the "anti-scammers" exposed a bogus agency offering the telephones of mythical persons in the United States who could purportedly give recommendations (recommendations were given by a telephone answering service), with fictitious e-mail addresses (on the Hotmail-type free postal service), and so on and so forth.

"Magnetism" according to Mogilevich

The hand of the U.S. law rarely reaches as far as Yekaterinburg or Vladivostok or Tyumen or Odessa or Gomel or Chisinau. But those of our former compatriots who begin playing games with the U.S. penal code on U.S. territory sooner or later end up in the dock.

A report from Pennsylvania says that FBI agents arrested Yakov Bogatin, 56, former president of YBM Magnex International Corp., a naturalized U.S. citizen of Soviet origin. According to Philadelphia Daily News, Bogatin was charged with securities fraud. The fraud involved persons known for their connections with Russian organized crime. Bogatin was set free on a $1 million bail and is now under house arrest and electronic surveillance.

In another report, the paper provides a more detailed account of the machinations and identities of Russian organized crime figures. The Pennsylvania-based YBM Magnex International Corp., manufacturing industrial magnets, was founded by the ill-famed Semyon Mogilevich, a former Kiev resident whom British law enforcers described in the second half of the 1990s as one of the world's most dangerous criminals: According to Western reports, he made a fortune from drug trafficking, arms smuggling, prostitution, and extortion rackets. By using double-entry bookkeeping, bribes, blackmail, and suchlike methods, Mogilevich and his sidekicks - Yakov Bogatin, Igor Fisherman, and Anatoly Tsura - showed investors non-existent super-profits, within a short time span inflating company stock prices from 10 cents to $20 apiece. The bubble burst in 1998; the company was slapped with stiff fines, and the share trading operation stopped.

Defrauded investors sank $400 million in YBM, of which, according to the indictment, Mogilevich pocketed more than $18 million; Bogatin, more than $10 million; Fisherman, $3 million; and Tsura, over $1 million.

Of the four suspects only Bogatin has been arrested. Mogilevich, Fisherman (51, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Ukraine), and Tsura (54, a Russian national) are on the run someplace in Russia. Recently Jeffrey Lampinski, head of the FBI Philadelphia division, enlisted the support of Russian and Ukrainian authorities in tracking them down.

Card "Cleaning"

Law enforcement agencies have long been using the term "high-tech crimes." Emigrants from the FSU are often involved in this type of crime. The Illinois-based Pioneer Press syndicated media group recently reported first instances of ATM card information theft in Chicago. The criminals entered stolen bank account numbers and PIN codes on clean cards, emptying hundreds of bank accounts.

An electronic scanning gadget is rigged into a teller machine, and when a card is inserted, the scanner device reads the information recorded on a card's magnetic strip and stores it in its memory. Police say each such device can store data on at least 100 cards.

Sometimes criminals use a mini camera to monitor the ATM key board (and the digits that a customer enters) from a car parked nearby.

The largest operation against high-tech swindlers was carried out in New York, where the "Russian mafia" used scanners in more than 20 places, stealing over $4 million from personal bank accounts. According to the police, the criminals used equipment that even banking experts found difficult to identify. Furthermore, the counterfeiters spent $50,000 to $60,000 to buy legal ATMs that were installed in retail centers and equipped with illegal scanning devices.

Sometimes they acted in a really crude manner, by pasting a hand-written note to an ATM which asked clients to use the device to "clean" their card.

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