The Russian government has for the past four years been fighting to keep 29-year-old alleged cybercriminal Alexei Burkov from being extradited by Israel to the United States. When Israeli authorities turned down requests to send him back to Russia — supposedly to face separate hacking charges there — the Russians then imprisoned an Israeli woman for seven years on trumped-up drug charges in a bid to trade prisoners. That effort failed as well, and Burkov had his first appearance in a U.S. court last week. What follows are some clues that might explain why the Russians are so eager to reclaim this young man.
Alexei Burkov, seated second from right, attends a hearing in Jerusalem in 2015. Andrei Shirokov / Tass via Getty Images.
On the surface, the charges the U.S. government has leveled against Burkov may seem fairly unremarkable: Prosecutors say he ran a credit card fraud forum called CardPlanet that sold more than 150,000 stolen cards.
However, a deep dive into the various pseudonyms allegedly used by Burkov suggests this individual may be one of the most connected and skilled malicious hackers ever apprehended by U.S. authorities, and that the Russian government is probably concerned that he simply knows too much.
Burkov calls himself a specialist in information security and denies having committed the crimes for which he’s been charged. But according to denizens of several Russian-language cybercrime forums that have been following his case in the Israeli news media, Burkov was by all accounts an elite cy ..
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