U.S. v. Adrian Mitan

On July 5, 2018, a federal grand jury charged one individual in United States v. Adrian Mitan, with money laundering offenses arising from a credit card phishing and brute-force attack scheme, likewise designed to steal money from Americans.  The indictment explains that phishing is an attempt to acquire personal information by masquerading as a trustworthy entity through electronic communications, and brute force is a cryptological trial-and-error methodology used to obtain information such as personal identification numbers for credit cards. Mitan allegedly phished for credit/debit card information of U.S. customers, hacked into the electronic systems of American businesses, and then conducted a brute force attack on their point-of-sale systems for the purpose of stealing the remaining credit/debit card information.  According to the indictment, Mitan then directed American money launderers to create “dummy” credit/debit cards with the stolen information, which were used to extract money from the customers’ accounts.  These fraudulent proceeds were then returned to Mitan in the form of bitcoin.