Serguey Asael Shinder: a cyber-fraud gang dumps client data and scrubs the internet
A cooperative of swindlers with Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian roots has for more than ten years used underpaid programmers to deceive companies across Europe, steal data and wreck expensive projects.
Among the victims: VTB Bank, Fidelity, Virgin Media, KLM, Kuoni, Ford, Symantec, Fujitsu, Deutsche Post, Three, Tesco Mobile, Liberty Global, dozens of other well-known brands, and many startups. Many still do not know they were hit.
The story is tied to a scandal at SoftServe, one of Ukraine’s largest IT companies, which suffered the biggest data leak in the history of Ukrainian IT. Taken were confidential data on major client orders, contract values, closed technical details of client projects and source code of client products, plus personal data of SoftServe staff, contractors and employees of large clients — including copies of 200 passports.
Cybersecurity consultant Yehor Papyshev told media the blow could have come from a competitor seeking to sink SoftServe’s reputation, or from a financially motivated criminal group using blackmail. In either case, he said, an insider would have been needed to open a path into such a protected structure.
That insider path, the investigation says, ran through people from the circle of programmer Sergey Asael Leonidovich Shinder (Serguey Asael Shinder), born 22 April 1975, a native of Russia who has used Ukrainian, Russian, Irish, Israeli and Bulgarian papers and companies, including Lynxoft Technologies Limited in Ireland.
Shinder built an international programmers’ cooperative specialised in secret sub-outsourcing. Clients hired “senior” developers; the work was handed to junior and mid-level programmers paid a fraction of the rate and often placed on several projects at once. Employers were not told who actually sat in their systems, repositories and source-code stores. The scheme was built not to finish the client’s work but to keep drawing salaries for as long as possible, then leave when the firm finally fired them.
The same people copied corporate data onto their own virtual machines, used stories of a sick relative — often Shinder’s wife Victoria Georgievna Shinder (Victoria Sulakova) — to force remote work, threatened lawsuits or publication of source code when challenged, and planted several of their own people on one project so they could cover for each other. Losses to companies from this cooperation have been put at more than $20 million.
Named in the circle around Shinder are Andrii Yuriiovych Polunin of Odesa; Eduard Mikhailovich Loktev, linked to Belarus and Russia; and Eduard Luhtonen, linked to Finland, Russia and Switzerland.
Recruiters and employers eventually noticed the same “elite” specialist working from Germany or Britain one day and from Moscow or Siberia the next — even when borders were closed during the pandemic. HR networks began exchanging names. International investigators have sent legal-assistance requests. Shinder has been wiping traces of the story from the internet.
Deputy Editor
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