The Israeli Gery “Gabi” Shalon is the accused mastermind of one of the biggest cybercrime organization. He was arrested in July 2015 in
- He and his co-conspirators allegedly hacked information from more than 80 million JPMorgan Chase & Co. clients and ran online gambling, stock manipulation and money laundering schemes around the world.
- U.S. prosecutors claim that Shalon generated hundreds of millions of dollars from “one of the largest thefts of financial-related data in history.”
- Shalon is charged with 23 counts, several of them carrying potential 20-year prison terms.
- FinTelegram has evidence that Shalon and his co-conspirators Vladislav Smirnov and Gal Barak continue to run their global cybercrime organization until today even though some more partners have been arrested recently in Europe.
The Secret Around The Shalon Court Case
According to Bloomberg’s latest findings, the scope of Gery Shalon‘s cooperation with U.S. authorities isn’t clear. The guy intersected with worlds that later came in the focus of “U.S. history’s most politically charged investigations“. The Israeli citizen with Georgian roots teamed up with Russian hackers such as Andrei Tyurin and Vladislav Smirnov. Shalon’s Russian connections could provide U.S. prosecutors with insider information on the Russian cybercrime scene.
Shalon has been allowed to remove his home monitoring device, his father told Georgian television. Shalon agreed to surrender $403 million in 2017, Israel’s Calcalist newspaper reported. However, many of the documents in Shalon’s case file remain sealed.
A release of Shalon would be “pretty extreme. He must be giving up somebody who is far more culpable than him, either in this crime or in a coordinated crime, to get that deal … There may be something coming down the road that will answer this riddle.
Rebecca Roiphe , New York Law School and former Manhattan prosecutor (Source: Bloomberg)
Still The Head Of The Cybercrime Organization
As a matter of fact, Gery Shalon is still closely connected with his long-time Russian partner Vladislav “Vlad” Smirnov (aka Vladislav Khokholkov) who cares about the payment services in Shalon’s global cybercrime organization. Shalon is using a Russian mobile phone to coordinate his activities with Vlad and his other deputies and partners.
Shalon was also giving his directions to Gal Barak, his Israeli partner in Bulgaria who until his arrest in Feb 2019 ran a vast network of illegally operating and fraudulent FOREX and crypto broker schemes. According to the enforcement agencies, dozens of thousands of victims lost hundreds of millions of Euros with these illegal broker sites such as SafeMarkets, GoldenMarkets, OptionStarsGlobal, or XtraderFX.
Investigations Just Started
Not only Bloomberg confirmed the FinTelegram findings in the cybercrime case around Gery Shalon and his father Shota Shalelashvili. Other media outlets in Georgia, Bulgaria, Israel, and Europe started to cover the case. The investigative platform Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) teamed up with FinTelegram and started to cover the money laundering case which was originally brought up the U.S. authorities in their 2015 indictment.
FinTelegram has received a lot of documents, affidavits, and information from former partners and insiders that provide sufficient evidence for ongoing money laundering activities and financial crime. The
