How to Steal a Million

Book excerpt: Sergey Pavlovich was a poor, talented boy from Belarus who made it big in the Russian-speaking hacking world of the early 2000s and earned millions of dollars from credit card fraud in just a few years. But he ended up in jail as a result of an FBI-led bust of what was dubbed the "largest and most complex identity theft in U.S. history." He spent his twenties in Belarus' brutal prison system. This is the tell-all story of Pavlovich's meteoric rise in the hacking world and his spectacular fall. It is packed with details about the shadowy cyber-crime world and the lucrative credit card fraud schemes and spamming operations he and his friends devised. Learn about some of the colorful personalities from the first flowering of Slavic cyber-crime in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine and be horrified by Pavlovich's experience in prisons that have changed little since Soviet times. Most famously, Pavlovich was involved in a fraud ring run by notorious U.S. hacker Albert Gonzalez, who led a double life as an informer for American intelligence. The losses caused by Gonzalez and his friends were estimated to have exceeded $1 billion. This book, written by Pavlovich while in prison, has already been enjoyed by more than 50,000 Russian readers.