Estonia, Financial Services, Legislation, Technology, USA

Tsastsin has submitted to the Estonian Ministry of Justice a request to serve his sentence in Estonia. The court in Estonia has to decide whether the U.S. punishment can be added to the punishment imposed in Estonia. After that the materials will move back to the U.S. where the authorities will make a decision regarding the place where Tsastsin would serve his sentence.

At the end of April, Tsastsin was sentenced in New York to over seven years in prison for his role in a cyberscam that infected 4 million computers in over 100 countries. He has already served nearly five years of the sentence.

Computers infected in the U.S. included some belonging to government agencies, including NASA. Other infected computers were at educational institutions, nonprofit organizations and commercial businesses. Individuals were also affected.

Computers were infected with software that disabled anti-virus protections and steered users to other websites.

Tsastsin was extradited to the United States in October 2014 after a two-year probe by the FBI and Estonian authorities.

Last July Tsastsin pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit computer intrusion and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, two of the 27 charges he had faced.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said that Tsastsin and his co-conspirators made more than 14 million U.S. dollars through the scheme.

According to the summary of charges, Tsastsin developed and distributed from 2007 til November 2011 the malware called DNS Changer, which infected at least four million computers in around 100 countries. The malware was used to redirect web traffic to sites controlled by the ring, which usually displayed ads and generated millions of euros of revenue for its operators.

In the framework of the criminal case opened in Estonia Tsastsin was charged with establishing a criminal organization and with money laundering committed by a group on a large scale and at least for the second time.