| In 1994, at the age of 23, Russian student Vladimir Levin stole more than $10
million dollars from Citibank in the biggest computer heist ever. He and his
accomplices used stolen access codes and passwords to enter the bank’s main
computers more than a dozen times, transferring funds to banks in the United
States, Europe, and Israel.
Levin was born in Russia in 1971. He graduated from the St. Petersburg (Russia)
Tekhnologichesky University and was working as a mathematician for A. O. Saturn,
a St. Petersburg-based trading company, at the time of the crime.
In July 1994, he struck up a friendship with a former St. Petersburg bus driver,
boasted of how he had wire-transferred money using Citibank’s Cash Manager
system to his own account in Finland, and told his friend how to do it. Together
they recruited at least five other accomplices.
In August 1994, Citibank detected two suspicious transfers amounting to more
than $400,000 and alerted the FBI, which began surveillance of the activity.
With the help of Russian authorities, they tracked the illegal fund transfers to
St. Petersburg. Levin had been operating out of his house, late at night during
New York business hours to reduce suspicion. He accessed the Cash Manager
service, which lets Citibank customers move funds to other banks with valid user
IDs and passwords of other banks.
Interpol agents arrested Levin in March of the following year at London’s
Heathrow Airport as he stepped off a flight from Moscow. He was extradited to
the United States six months later and tried in the U. S. District Court of the
Southern District of New York. According to court documents, he was accused of
stealing $400,000 and illegally transferring another $11.6 million. He struck a
plea bargain and pleaded guilty to stealing $3.7 million. He was sentenced in
1998 to three years in prison and ordered to pay $240,000 in restitution to
Citibank, which says that most of the money illegally transferred was recovered.
Citibank upgraded all security procedures following the breach of its Cash
Manager system. |
