Guilty plea in Moscow-based fraud scheme that targeted San Juan Unified students
Ten years after a Moscow-based hacker conspired with U.S.-based residents to steal report cards from San Juan Unified School District high school students in a $3.4 million fraud, the final defendant in the case pleaded guilty in federal court Tuesday.
Aleksandr Maslov, 40, pleaded guilty in federal court in Sacramento to two counts of wire fraud and one count of failure to appear, charges that could net him up to 20 years in prison.
Maslov originally was charged in 2015 and released, but failed to appear for a 2018 court hearing and remained a fugitive until he was apprehended by the FBI in Richmond, Virginia, in July 2019.
He entered into a plea agreement in September, and is scheduled to be sentenced Aug. 10 before U.S. District Judge John A. Mendez.
Maslov and other defendants were accused of orchestrating a fraud in which they used student names and personal information to create more than 70 phony companies with names such as “Best Box,” “Chevran” or “Walt Mart,” then used stolen credit card information from more than 119,000 cards to make charges to those companies.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Sacramento said in announcing the charges in 2015 that “the defendants obtained information for credit card accounts and processed a large number of small payments from different credit cards in a relatively short period of time.”
“The credit card providers such as American Express and third-party payment processors such as PayPal credited the businesses’ accounts based on the processed credit card transactions for the purported sales,” the office said.
Two of the other defendants in the case have been sentenced and are currently serving lengthy prison terms.
Ruslan Kirilyuk, 43, of Beverly Hills is in federal custody in Beaumont, Texas, and has a projected release date of Jan. 15, 2041.
Mihran Melkonyan, 41, of Sacramento is incarcerated at Victorville and is projected to be released Aug. 13, 2031.
Authorities say information from 200 stolen San Juan report cards helped the fraudsters set up the phony companies.