Hacking JFK Airport’s Taxi Service

Join me this week to hear about two individuals who made over a quarter million dollars from fellow cabbies with assistance from their Russian hacker friends! This is eCrimeBytes.com Season 3, Episode 9: Hacking JFK Airport’s Taxi Service.

Sources:

• https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/two-men-arrested-conspiring-russian-nationals-hack-taxi-dispatch-system-jfk-airport
• https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/queens-men-sentenced-prison-conspiring-hack-taxi-dispatch-system-jfk-airport
• https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66672473/united-states-v-abayev/
• https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66672480/united-states-v-abayev/
• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443453/quotes/
• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13143964/quotes/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-OpLcb6prw
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLP35W3IaSU

Transcript:

00:00:00:00 – 00:00:27:31
Keith
What’s up, you crazy bastards. Welcome to another week of eCrimeBytes. This is where I research the court documentation and roast the criminals so you don’t have to. All right, so this week I’m bringing you season three, Episode nine. This is hacking JFK Airport’s Taxi Services. That may sound incredibly vague to you. And when I read it for the first time, I was like, What is this about?

00:00:27:31 – 00:00:30:51
Keith
And I had to read into it because this all a very interesting story.

00:00:30:51 – 00:00:36:49
Keith
Let me give you a little bit of information about each of the individuals to introduce you to the story. All right.

00:00:37:01 – 00:00:58:49
Keith
So I’m going to introduce you to the main individual first. His name is Daniel Abayev. Okay. And I’m going to be calling him Daniel from now on, because, you know, if you’ve joined me on a few episodes, I use a lot of voice to text to make my closed captions. So I go with the easiest name possible. So I’m going to be going with Daniel throughout here for him.

00:00:58:53 – 00:01:31:39
Keith
Now, Daniel is from Uzbekistan. Okay. He is a cab driver. He is also a home health care attendant. He’s a medical biller. Plus, he flips goods on eBay. So if you don’t know anything else about him but you just learned that, you’ve got to think this guy, he’s a hustler, right? I mean, he’s always working. He’s driving a cab or he’s working at and, you know, doing these medical billings or actually doing medical work for people.

00:01:31:44 – 00:02:02:15
Keith
And when he’s not doing that, he’s probably sitting in front of the TV assuming he spends money on a TV and is there on eBay flipping goods. He he’s buying and selling. Right. So this guy is also the mastermind behind the crime I’m going to bring you. All right. So beginning approximately November 2019, this individual, Daniel, another individual that I’m going to introduce to you in a minute here and two Russian hackers.

00:02:02:20 – 00:02:27:44
Keith
And I’ll introduce you to the Russian hackers later on as well. But they all together decided they wanted to hack this dispatch system for the taxi services of JFK Airport. Okay. Now I’m going to tell you I’m going to explain how the taxi service works at this airport in a minute. I’m going to explain the whole hack. And it’s going I got pictures.

00:02:27:44 – 00:02:47:00
Keith
Just hold on a second here. But I want to point out a few important things right now to you before I start showing you these pictures. One is they really wanted to hack in there. Okay. So it wasn’t just let’s try and see if we can get in from the outside while we’re drinking a couple of Old Milwaukees and eating cheese curls.

00:02:47:05 – 00:03:13:53
Keith
No, they wanted to bribe somebody that worked there to take a flash drive, like a USB stick. Flash drive. Right. Containing malware to put into this dispatch system. So if you don’t know what that means, but you’ve seen the movie Office Space, same type of scenario, right, where you put something on a stick and then you put it into a computer and then the malware does its thing and then the bad guys get their payoff.

00:03:13:53 – 00:03:38:00
Keith
All right. That’s what’s sort of happening here where they want to pay an insider to put malware on the network so they can then make the money that I’m going to talk to you about here in a second. You need to take away here that they really wanted to do this. All right. They also didn’t stop there. They also wanted to gain access or they tried to gain access, which was unauthorized.

00:03:38:02 – 00:04:01:50
Keith
They didn’t have authorization to do this, but they tried to gain access to this dispatch system’s wi fi network, just like when you go to your friend’s house and you’re like, Hey, can I have your Wi-Fi password? They didn’t have the Wi-Fi password, but they tried to basically guess it on the Wi-Fi system because once you do that, then you can get to other resources that you normally can’t get to outside the network, right?

00:04:01:55 – 00:04:23:23
Keith
Well, I don’t know if that didn’t work or what. That was just kind of mentioned in the court paperwork. But they also another plan, they wanted to steal computer tablets, like basically computers connected to the dispatch system so they could do the stuff that I’m going to talk to you about. So I’m going to go down the path and tell you how they actually did this.

00:04:23:23 – 00:04:29:34
Keith
And so your next question should be the same question that I have, which is why would they want to get into the dispatch system?

00:04:29:47 – 00:04:36:36
Keith
You know what in there what could they monetize off this? Now, this is interesting.

00:04:36:36 – 00:04:55:08
Keith
So I’m going to put a picture on your screen here and we’re I’m going to be flipping this is going to animate. Okay. As I’m talking. So pay attention as you’re watching and this is audio listeners, I really recommend that you watch this on YouTube because I have pictures of everything like this that explains everything about the crime.

00:04:55:13 – 00:05:29:51
Keith
All right. So for you, video viewers, this is what I’m going to go through here. You’ve got your airport on the upper left hand corner there. You got your cabs down in the lower left hand corner there. Now, if you can imagine, you have passengers there arriving at the airport, coming in from all these different countries. Right. And you have probably hundreds, if not thousands of cab drivers that want to get these fares, because if you’ve ever been to New York City where JFK Airport is, you know that transportation is very expensive.

00:05:29:51 – 00:05:57:41
Keith
You’re spending easily 50 to 100 bucks just to go one way someplace. So imagine there’s parking lots basically full of cab drivers that would come to the airport to wait for people that would arrive on flights in order to pick up fares. So the airport doesn’t want, you know, hundreds and thousands of cab drivers eventually probably getting into fistfights over who gets the next fare.

00:05:57:42 – 00:06:20:47
Keith
They want an orderly process. And from what I understand, this orderly process is like a queue system where if you show up first, you’re sort of first in line to get the next passenger that comes out. And then as you pick one up, you know, it goes from there, right? So this is the process I’m going to describe to you now on our screen.

00:06:21:36 – 00:06:48:41
Keith
You don’t really have humans behind the scenes saying, okay, cab A, go to terminal B to pick somebody up. It’s all computerized. Okay. So that’s why I’m going to put a, that’s why there’s a server on this organizational chart is it’s a computer making these decisions and basically dispatching cabs from this queue of where they wait for passengers to the airport to pick up the passenger.

00:06:48:52 – 00:07:08:50
Keith
And from what I understand, you can’t really just jump the line. I guess physically you probably could, but you’d probably get in trouble and you basically just go into that queue and you wait and there’s a computer system that’s like, Hey, Keith, go now to Terminal A and pick up passenger at turnstile number three, something along those lines.

00:07:08:50 – 00:07:32:57
Keith
That’s how I understood it. Okay. So this computer is now telling the the cab drivers where to go, what terminals to pick these people up at. And that’s what I’m just showing you on your screen, that, you know, it basically it talks to the the the cab driver who’s next in line and says, hey, it’s your turn now.

00:07:32:57 – 00:08:00:11
Keith
Go over to Terminal B and you see the cab driver goes up, is all over now in Terminal B gets his fare. Everybody else then says, hey, I’m going to move up one spot. And now the queue continues, right? This is how it’s supposed to work when someone’s not screwing around with the process. Okay. And now we’re going to be talking about Daniel, who came in and wants to screw with this process and capitalize off it.

00:08:00:11 – 00:08:18:24
Keith
Right. And you could probably think of a bunch of different ways you could try to make money off this. They have an interesting method here. So now what I’m going to do on your screen is you see this hacker outline in your upper right hand corner. Okay, same picture as before. You got your cab is on the bottom.

00:08:18:24 – 00:08:43:37
Keith
You got your airport at the top, you got your dispatch server right in the middle there saying, hey, cab A go to terminal B, But now we have the hacker next to it. And if we assume that this hacker gets access in some way, shape or form, and that’s just my red arrow here, either it be the malware on the USB stick that we talked about or any of the other ways, right?

00:08:43:44 – 00:09:08:40
Keith
Or maybe it’s just hacking in through a vulnerability on the outside, maybe it’s something like that. But they get access to this dispatch system and now you can imagine game on right? So you have this dude roll up in an orange taxicab, right? He doesn’t look like the yellow taxi cabs that I’ve been showing you. So first already, this fucker is suspect suspect right out of the gate because he doesn’t look like everybody else.

00:09:08:40 – 00:09:18:40
Keith
His car looks different. What is he going to do? Well, he’s not like everybody else because he knows of a secret. He knows the secret that this hacker is in the system.

00:09:18:40 – 00:09:28:06
Keith
So what he does is he says, Hey, Mr. Hacker, here is $10. $10. Just move me to the front line, please. All right.

00:09:28:06 – 00:09:48:27
Keith
$10 might not seem like a lot. Okay. And yeah, I guess maybe in today it isn’t. But you’re going to see, first of all, it adds up. So when it’s just one cabdriver giving over $10 to jump the line? That doesn’t seem like a lot of money.

00:09:48:27 – 00:10:00:04
Keith
But if you have a hundred in a day or maybe a thousand in a day, and then you have multiple days because you know, airports never sleep, you’re going to be making a lot of money.

00:10:00:04 – 00:10:02:51
Keith
And so at this point, let’s

00:10:02:51 – 00:10:09:24
Keith
just assume the hacker gets their $10 and they say, yeah, Bob, I’m going to move you to the front of the line.

00:10:09:30 – 00:10:30:19
Keith
All right. And how he does that after he has his $10 is he basically says, Hey, dispatch server, go to that car that looks like no other cab out there, the orange one. Go to that one and tell it can pick up the next fare, which would be at some terminal. You know, I’ll just say it’s Terminal A at JFK Airport.

00:10:30:19 – 00:10:43:25
Keith
And then the orange van’s like, hey, check that out. Zoom zooms right up there, picks up their fare, which I imagine I imagine if anybody else is sitting in that line and

00:10:43:25 – 00:10:50:38
Keith
goes, How come that orange car pulls up, only waits here 10 minutes and then zooms up there?

00:10:50:43 – 00:11:13:08
Keith
And if there’s maybe ten people that notices out of maybe a hundred taxi cabs, you would imagine that would get noticed. And part of me thinks that maybe this is how the scheme was caught, because I imagine there were probably some pissed off people that were like, I’m not going to pay $10 every time to jump this line.

00:11:13:13 – 00:11:31:13
Keith
Now, when you hear about $10 and I gave you a little bit of frame reference where it doesn’t sound like much to a person, think about it from the cab drivers aspect. Now, I left a little piece of the story out of here for you on purpose because I wanted a little bit of a little bit of umph when I give this to you.

00:11:31:18 – 00:11:48:39
Keith
When they would go to these lots, they wouldn’t just wait there like ten, 15 minutes. It wasn’t like I showed up and call my wife real quick. All right? Yeah. You know, Nice to see you. Nice to… I’ll see you when I get home. My fare’s here. I got to go and they take off. No, it’s not like that at all.

00:11:48:40 – 00:12:10:34
Keith
From what I read, they can spend hours multiple hours in this lot waiting on a fare, which, again, I got to be like, How much are these fares that they go, I’m going to give up a couple hours just to sit in this line for one goddamn fare. That, to me seemed just out of this world when I read this.

00:12:10:34 – 00:12:36:14
Keith
So I wanted to point that out and tell you that when they’re paying $10, it might not seem like a lot, but it’s it’s a lot to the cab drivers because they can now service how many other other passengers in the day by simply paying, what, like a latte or so. I mean, it’s not that much in the scheme of things.

00:12:36:20 – 00:12:59:27
Keith
If he gets a 50 to $100 tip, it’s only, what, like 10%? I said $100 tip. But $100 fare. If he’s paying $10 off on top of that, that’s what, 10%? Not a ton of money off there. I mean, it still sucks. Still sucks, but anyways, that, my friend, is the scheme. This is the scheme that we are talking about throughout here and I hope you appreciate the pictures.

00:12:59:27 – 00:13:15:56
Keith
I put a lot of time into that and you’re probably like, Yeah look at that perfect yellow cabs. Exactly how I’d imagine when I close my eyes because the other day I was listening to one of my or I was talking to a listener, on one of the previous episodes and I realized I didn’t have pictures to show you guys.

00:13:16:00 – 00:13:34:21
Keith
So I’m going to try to do more pictures like this in the future so you can kind of understand what’s going on inside my head. Because sometimes I describe things in words and I realize they probably don’t translate as well as a picture. So that, my friends, that is what’s going inside on inside my head when I’m reading these court documents.

00:13:34:25 – 00:14:07:12
Keith
So my next question is, All right, all right. This has got to scale right? You can’t just have five cab drivers willing to pay $10 a couple times a day. That just it doesn’t scale for having to pay people to break into dispatch systems and pay insiders to put malware on the dispatch systems. You need hundreds and thousands of fares probably in a day to make this really worth, in my opinion, possibly going to prison.

00:14:07:23 – 00:14:34:34
Keith
Right. So I introduced you upfront, Daniel. Daniel was the one that was the mastermind of this whole scheme, but he had an accomplice. And this is Peter Leyman and Peter, he collected the money. So if I could categorize this is just my opinion, my categorization of this case when I read the difference between these two criminals where

00:14:34:34 – 00:14:41:31
Keith
you had Daniel up front and he was the mastermind, he basically orchestrated everything.

00:14:41:44 – 00:15:09:08
Keith
But then he had Peter who just needed to make some money, and it was an easy way for him to work with Daniel, make some money. And I think if I can read between the lines, I think Daniel probably put Peter in the position of having to collect the physical money because that’s the riskiest position in all these crimes that I’ve been bringing you for the past year or so.

00:15:09:12 – 00:15:36:13
Keith
So this is what this is the type of position I imagine we’re dealing with when I’m discussing what Peter does here. So this is Peter Leyman, Now Peter’s from Kazak. I laugh. I’m sorry. This is the point in the case where it just went sideways for me and I was like, oh I’m going with it. He’s from Kazakstan, okay? He’s Jewish.

00:15:36:17 – 00:15:51:00
Keith
And he says he faced a lot of discrimination from it. So again, as I promised to you, pictures, right. Pictures. How I envision this case is the picture I’m putting on the screen for you now, which is basically kind of a version of

00:15:51:00 – 00:16:13:36
Keith
Borat, right? I am. I enjoy the movie. I think it’s funny. So I thought when we saw those two countries come together, when I had Uzbekistan earlier and Kazakstan now, I was like, I can’t read the court research in this whole case and not have any Borat references.

00:16:13:37 – 00:16:44:14
Keith
I can’t because, you know, you know, Borat is from Kazakhstan. He hates Uzbekistan. And he, and I apologize Jews, but he hates Jews. So like, when I read about the discrimination, I was like, my God, this is just like Borat. And and then I went down this whole tangent of I want to hear some Borat quotes, so I will give you my favorite quote that I read out of probably hundreds. And this.

00:16:44:19 – 00:17:11:10
Keith
Sorry, this is hard. He says, We use my iPhone 4 hotspot and steal password from assholes Uzbekistan. All right. So, yeah, the whole time. The whole time I’m reading this documentation, I’m just hearing the the Borat quotes and accent and everything in the back of my mind and, you know, things like

00:17:11:10 – 00:17:14:18
Keith
wife cages, because I joke about this kind of stuff at home.

00:17:14:18 – 00:17:18:31
Keith
My wife and I joke about this kind of stuff. Wife cages kind of good thing. Kind of good

00:17:18:31 – 00:17:23:31
Keith
thing. She doesn’t agree. I agree. Kind of good thing in our household. I’m just joking.

00:17:23:31 – 00:17:34:31
Keith
Yeah, my last Borat joke. I promise. I promise you. But it it it touches home for me because parts of his movie were actually even loosely based on my life.

00:17:34:31 – 00:17:41:02
Keith
And if you don’t believe that I do have a screen capture of when I proposed to my wife and asked her to marry me

00:17:41:02 – 00:17:44:56
Keith
and I brought my wedding sack too. Again, just joking. But

00:17:44:56 – 00:17:55:43
Keith
anyways. All right, so that’s it. I had to get some Borat. It’s out of my system now. I promise you. That was a last Borat joke, but I will still be thinking about this throughout this whole episode.

00:17:55:48 – 00:18:24:51
Keith
All right, so let’s get back to Peter Leyman. So, Peter, I found out by reading the court documentation still owes. Now I’m not going to give you the dollar amount yet. I want you to concentrate on that phrase that I just said. Still owes, meaning, he’s he’s paid money already on this, okay? He still owes $120,000 on a taxi medallion.

00:18:24:56 – 00:18:54:22
Keith
And I sat there for a minute and I was like, Holy FUCK, how could you afford $120,000 Taxi Medallion and then try to even be a boss in the taxi service industry? I just. I couldn’t imagine how you’d pay that off. That is amazing to me that it would cost that much, that I just it floored me when I read that in the court paperwork.

00:18:54:26 – 00:19:17:02
Keith
So in this scheme, I brought it to you. I told you about the hacks and how it works and stuff, but somebody had to collect the money and that was Peter Leyman. Okay, it’s like Peter may have collected some physicical cash at some points, but it sounds like the bulk of the cash was made through mobile payment systems.

00:19:17:07 – 00:19:37:27
Keith
Okay, so two main sources, it was either physical money in my hand or it’s something like I… Jesus. I don’t even know what people use these like PayPal. Well, something along those lines. My wife pays everybody. She doesn’t let me have any money. So I. I know, I know. It’s the part of the research I can’t do.

00:19:37:27 – 00:20:00:27
Keith
I can’t help you with. I don’t know how to pay for things because my wife just does not allow me to have money. I got to ask for everything from her when we buy it, but that’ll be a topic of another episode. I promise to you. So Peter is collecting all these payments. $10 at a time. Probably hundreds, if not thousands of transactions in a day and collect it for this group of four people.

00:20:00:27 – 00:20:22:17
Keith
Okay. Peter Leyman, the guy I just talked to about Daniel, the first guy I talked about, and these two Russian hackers that are still in Russia. So let me tell you about them. And I’m going to murder the names. You know, I try to always try once. I like very seriously try people’s names once just to be just because my name’s Keith Jones.

00:20:22:18 – 00:21:04:19
Keith
It’s easy. So I just try to be respectful. So the two Russians are. Go with me on this. Aleksandr Derebentc, and I’ll spell it for you. It’s D, e, r, e, b e, n, t, c. Okay, I try my best. And Kirill and that’s spelled k i r i l l Shipulin spelled s h i p u l i n. Okay now I try my best to only give you stuff that’s in the court paperwork.

00:21:04:19 – 00:21:23:20
Keith
Okay. These two have been charged, but they have not been tried. They have not been arrested. Okay, so know that going in. I just want to say that up front, like they could be tried and arrested later on and the government goes, they had nothing to do with this. Right now, the government thinks they had something to do with this.

00:21:23:20 – 00:21:49:35
Keith
They’ve been tr, they’ve been charged. But as long as they stay in Russia, they will just continue to stay charged probably the rest of their life. As soon as they go to America or Canada or somewhere else that would probably extradite, they will probably be extradited to the US and they will face the same charges of the two individuals that we’re talking about here, maybe even more, because they are the hackers in this case.

00:21:49:40 – 00:22:12:59
Keith
So one very small footnote here is they probably knew that law enforcement were coming eventually because the four of them, when they talk to each other, they actually use telegram because of the encryption capabilities that it had. Just wanted to give that to the technical listeners out there. Sometimes you wonder, hey, what kind of technologies do they use? These four.

00:22:13:03 – 00:22:40:36
Keith
According to the court paperwork, it was telegram. Now you can imagine they’ve got this whole enterprise set up, right? You’ve got Daniel, who’s the mastermind. You’ve got these two hackers in Russia who deal with getting access to the dispatch system. You’ve got Leyman sitting there with the collecting everybody’s cash. It’s it’s it’s a corporation. I mean, it’s like it’s a full time job.

00:22:40:41 – 00:22:58:14
Keith
So they almost treat it like that. So they say to some of these people that would come in and say, hey, here’s my $10 to jump my line, They would say, Hey, I tell you what, I’m going to give you a freebie. It’s like drugs, right? It’s like drugs. But I’ll give you a freebie. I’ll give you a freebie now.

00:22:58:19 – 00:23:15:32
Keith
But you got to bring me two people that, you know, that were willing to pay me this $10 to jump the line every time. And I imagine some cab drivers were like, I just got to bring you some people and I can I can jump for free, right? Yep. That’s that’s the deal. They’re like, well, fuck, yes, that’s easy, right?

00:23:15:32 – 00:23:39:48
Keith
I mean, everybody sees us jumping the goddamn line anyways, because none of us, none of us are being secret about this. So why not? Why shouldn’t I not get a cut of this? Right? So there were some people that got to actually cut the line for free, and then they just they recruited more people to come pay this, which I was like, they’re really building their criminal enterprise at this point.

00:23:39:53 – 00:24:07:31
Keith
This this was ah I thought in a now, I know it’s weird for me to say this, but in a this impressed me. This impressed me. They had brokers that would buy lots meaning like several skips in a line in a lot like you know how if like you bought a bus ticket you might buy a bus pass of ten tickets? Kind of like that.

00:24:07:31 – 00:24:31:45
Keith
Like I’m going to buy ten passes to skip the line in this criminal scheme in bulk. So you’d have some brokers that would be like, Yeah, I’ll buy a thousand of those. Right? And then basically because they would buy a thousand, they’d basically mark it up to some people and maybe they had a taxi cab company of their own and they were like, Well, I’m going to use 200 of these on my own and then sell off a chunk of these.

00:24:31:45 – 00:25:03:47
Keith
Right? So there was, it wasn’t just the criminal enterprise that I’m talking to you about that this whole episode’s about. There was a criminal enterprise based upon the criminal enterprise because they were brokering these skips in line, which I was just like, This is amazing. So you have questions like, how do they manage this? How do you have hundreds and thousands of people possibly getting involved with this?

00:25:03:52 – 00:25:29:31
Keith
It wouldn’t be hundreds and thousands of people. It’ll be hundreds and thousand, hundreds and thousands of skips in a day is what I read. So if you extrapolate that down a little bit, it’d be like, what maybe 10 to 50 people a day maybe. I’m guessing. They didn’t say in the court paperwork. And then you multiply that out each day for months and months and months in a few years.

00:25:29:36 – 00:25:54:00
Keith
That’s that’s a lot of people that’s definitely that’s hundreds of people, I would say. And again, we’re just kind of guessing. The court paperwork didn’t say for sure. Now you need a way to talk to all these people. So they’re basically in chat rooms, right, where they’re kind of like the administrator of these hacker chat rooms. They didn’t say specifically what it was.

00:25:54:05 – 00:26:18:10
Keith
It could have been telegram, it could have been Slack for all I know. But you can imagine they’re an administrator. And when they’re they’re taking money and moving people to the front line, you imagine there’s probably a few hundred taxi drivers in there. They’re like “shop open”. And then all the taxi drivers go, Hey, here’s my $10, here’s my $10, and they get medallion numbers from these taxi drivers.

00:26:18:10 – 00:26:34:24
Keith
Once they take their money and they push them to the front of the line in the computer and they go pick up their fare and that’s it. And then I imagine at some point the hackers are like, Well, we can’t do this anymore. We’re either tired or we ran out of Mountain Dew or we just made enough money for today.

00:26:34:29 – 00:27:00:55
Keith
On the chat they go “shop closed” and they’re closed for business for the day. So it was just like a shop. It was just like a corporation. They were marketing, they had hours of business and everything. It was absolutely just insane. And they didn’t want their customers getting caught because if their customers get caught, that means eventually they’ll probably get caught, right?

00:27:01:00 – 00:27:07:49
Keith
So what are they to do to try to keep their shop open just a little longer? They tell their customers how not to get caught.

00:27:07:49 – 00:27:22:24
Keith
So on the screen, I’m going to put a message that they sent to their their customers and their potential customers, telling them how not to get caught by the police. Now, I’m going to keep my opinions.

00:27:22:24 – 00:27:46:01
Keith
No, no, I’m not going to keep my opinions myself. There’s not a lot of good information in here on how not to get caught from the police. Okay. In my opinion, there’s not they’re just telling you what streets to stay off of. Okay. So audio listeners, I’ll read to you real quick. It just says Dear drivers, please do not wait at the gas station in JFK and I think they mean the airport.

00:27:46:06 – 00:27:53:29
Keith
They say please do not go around the CTH lot which I’m not exactly sure what that is. I imagine it’s like a cell phone holding type of

00:27:53:29 – 00:28:04:17
Keith
lot. And then it says do not wait at Rockway Avenue. And they put emoji for a police officer and then they say you have to be very, very carefully. And they put a couple of emojis for police

00:28:04:17 – 00:28:05:36
Keith
officers.

00:28:05:41 – 00:28:30:15
Keith
So this is their message to their customers and how they’re going to stay safe, stay off the street, don’t go by this lot and don’t go around the airport too many times because you’re going to draw suspicion and get caught. Okay. So you can imagine, because I did at this point, I start asking questions. I was like, So they have hundreds of transactions in a day.

00:28:30:17 – 00:28:58:47
Keith
This is what I read. Pushing on they were saying thousands of transactions a day. Let’s just say a thousand transactions in a day, right? You have different people making these transactions. You have different cab drivers bringing in your marketing, right? You got your one cab driver that you’re like, I’ll give you free cuts in the line if you bring in two people. You got to keep all that stuff straight because somebody’s going to be like, Hey, you owe me three cuts.

00:28:58:47 – 00:28:59:28
Keith
Spreadsheets.

00:28:59:41 – 00:29:18:18
Keith
That’s how this criminal enterprise, kept it, kept it all in check. Spreadsheets. And here’s one example spreadsheet that was in the court documentation that I have on the screen for you. Now, I’m not going to go through it because this looks like it’s pretty complex where they have everybody’s name on there. How many, I guess, rides or cuts in line?

00:29:18:18 – 00:29:28:14
Keith
It is. And they break it all out so they can make sure that everybody gets paid appropriately and, you know, and and pays up appropriately too

00:29:28:14 – 00:29:28:35
Keith
right.

00:29:28:35 – 00:29:42:38
Keith
Okay. So there’s a point where they’re making so much goddamn the money where they’re bragging about it. They’re chatting. Here is a quote where Abayev says, quote unquote, On our

00:29:42:38 – 00:30:15:38
Keith
end this is absolutely a record here. We almost have 600. We netted at least 500. This has never happened before. This is exactly the level that I want to have every day. Now in the morning, we’re going to collect the dough. Okay. So if that didn’t mean much to you, let me give you the Keith Jones translation. I read that as he was making 5 to 600 transactions a day where he allows cab drivers to cut the line. So we know it’s $10 a piece.

00:30:15:38 – 00:30:31:42
Keith
So where he’s making about 5 to $6000 a day on average, it sounds like. And obviously he says in the morning we’re going to collect the dough so he knows that the money, it’s coming in.

00:30:31:42 – 00:30:54:07
Keith
So immediately I wondered, you got a mastermind and then you got these two Russia hackers over here. Who gets paid what? Does one person get paid more than the others? Surprisingly, it wasn’t. They all got paid 25%. There was four people. And when it came in, they split it four ways.

00:30:54:11 – 00:31:05:39
Keith
They basically. Well, they split it in half. First, they took 50% and sent to the Russians because it was harder to send over there than it was to just split it when they were in America.

00:31:05:39 – 00:31:26:30
Keith
You’ve got to have a reason to send things overseas, especially once you start dealing with amounts that are going to be over $10,000. And you see I’ll talk about the amounts in a minute, but they’re definitely over $10,000. So they got to be careful not to draw attention when they’re taking large amounts of money and going from America to Russia.

00:31:26:43 – 00:31:53:55
Keith
Okay. When they did this, when they sent these payments from America to Russia, they for lack of a better term, they gave it like a, you know, a physical check’s memo field where you kind of write in, you know, groceries or whatever it is you’re buying on your check. Kind of the same thing on whatever system it was that the government found that they were paying out through.

00:31:54:06 – 00:32:17:58
Keith
So they said that they were paying these people for a quote unquote, payment for software development over in Russia or quote unquote, payment for services rendered. Definitely not payment for hacking JFK’s taxi service dispatch system. It did not say that. And it kind of reminded me of that memo field, which, by the way, don’t tell my wife.

00:32:17:58 – 00:32:33:04
Keith
But back in college days, whenever I had to pay a friend, I would always write in there sexual favors just to upset them having to go to the bank. Because back when I was in college, paper checks, that was pretty much the only way you could pay people unless you had cash. So you’d always have to write something funny in there.

00:32:33:04 – 00:32:54:21
Keith
And that’s just what you did back in the nineties. All right. So this scheme, like I told you about, was selling hundreds of trips per day, and I saw that it did top out at thousands of trips per day. And if you multiply ten times a thousand, that’s that’s $10,000 that they’re making in a day and then dividing by four.

00:32:54:36 – 00:32:57:57
Keith
That’s a lot of money to be bringing in per day.

00:32:57:57 – 00:33:09:17
Keith
So the dispatch system, they have administrators, security people that I think figure this out after a while or maybe somebody complained, but they were like, uhh oooo

00:33:09:22 – 00:33:27:06
Keith
there’s people in our system. And they tried to get the people out of their system. And then when you do that, a lot of times you find that there’s a lot of deficiencies in your system. So they’re trying to push hackers out of their system. They go, well, this system needs to be updated over here. So that’s going to take time and money.

00:33:27:11 – 00:33:53:22
Keith
And they go, well, this thing needs to be updated over here. That takes time and money. And while they’re doing that, between 2019 and 2021 when this hack happened, it’s costing a bunch of money and this is going to be part of the cost of the restitution later on when you talk about millions of dollars. Okay. But as they’re also doing this process, the hackers will lose access for a little bit.

00:33:53:23 – 00:34:19:55
Keith
They’ll be like, fuck. All right, well, we got to get back in and they find another way to get in and might be a different vulnerability. Or maybe they would try to pay somebody to take malware in there. And some of these new methods, they did say in the court paperwork, like I said, involved corrupting employees at JFK to assist them in gaining access to this dispatch system.

00:34:20:02 – 00:34:58:44
Keith
So they wanted to basically pay them or maybe social engineer them to get their access to then continue their scheme. Right. So the dispatch system, they’re dealing with this for two goddamn years while this scheme is going on. Right. And then finally, I guess the scheme kind of peters out a little bit for two, two main reasons. According to what I read in the paperwork, it wasn’t like the administrators went in and put the security stopgap in and they were like, Ha ha, you are now out of our system.

00:34:58:49 – 00:35:34:11
Keith
It was more like there was a dramatic decrease in air travel caused by the COVID pandemic, and that brought down travel and then there was like competition with things like Uber and Lyft that brought down usage of yellow taxis, which is a specifically what this system is used for. Okay. So basically this scheme was kind of petering out on its own, not necessarily because somebody put a stop gap measure in technically in the network, at least from the documentation that I read.

00:35:34:11 – 00:36:08:06
Keith
Right. So you can imagine eventually these people are caught. So December 5th, 2022, there’s an indictment that comes out and there were two counts of conspiracy to commit to commit computer intrusions against both of these individuals, Daniel and Leyman here, both in the U.S.. Okay. Now there’s the two defendants in Russia. They were charged, but again, they their documents haven’t been unsealed or anything yet because they haven’t been arrested.

00:36:08:11 – 00:36:37:21
Keith
They’re they’re still in Russia. And they’ll unless they make a mistake and go to a country that’s going to ship them to the U.S., they’re probably going to be safe if they stay in Russia. So about a year goes by. So now it’s October 5th of 2023. And Peter, that’s Leyman here, he pleads guilty. He was what I would call the underling out of the two here. He was the one that collected the money.

00:36:37:26 – 00:36:57:07
Keith
He pled guilty to one count of the indictment, which was well, they were both the same, but he only pled to one count instead of pleading to both of them. So it’s not like, well, in some of these previous cases that I’ve brought you week after week, we’ve had some of these criminals come in there and say, I’ll plead guilty to everything.

00:36:57:07 – 00:37:17:30
Keith
And I go, Hey, why why would you do that? Well, here they pled guilty to only one of the two counts. They kind of get something out of pleading guilty here. So, Leyman comes in and he pleads guilty. And I imagine Daniel probably saw that and he was like, well, he pled guilty. He’s probably going to roll on me.

00:37:17:30 – 00:37:39:56
Keith
I mean, well, fuck that. I’m going to plead guilty to one count. So within the same month, about a month apart. So Daniel was actually on October 30th of 2023, he pled guilty to one count, just like Peter did. So the government was like, Fuck, yes. All right, all right. They get to walk up to the judge.

00:37:39:58 – 00:38:11:51
Keith
Go, Listen to me, Judge. This is this is what we think should happen for sentencing, all right? We think the court should impose a sixty month sentence on Daniel the mastermind. Now 60 months is five years. If you don’t want to do the math, that’s five years. And they said, hey, we think there should be a 57 to 60 month imprisonment to Leymen to who is the in my opinion, underling that well, who okay.

00:38:11:51 – 00:38:14:52
Keith
So if I measure that sentence wise, you’re basically saying

00:38:14:52 – 00:38:29:45
Keith
they were both about equally culpable. Right. They’re both going to be doing about the same amount of time. If I read in sentence in years. Right. You’re looking at about five years for both of them. And the government says, yeah, yeah, Keith, we are.

00:38:29:50 – 00:38:54:35
Keith
And even worse, we’re coming back and we’re saying you got to pay a restitution of $3.4 million. And I went, How do they have a restitution of $3.4 million? That’s where the dispatch system had to constantly try to get them out of the system, and then apparently upgrade their system to keep them out of the system. That’s where that money factors in.

00:38:54:40 – 00:39:17:44
Keith
If you’re curious why it’s so much now, that’s a lot of money. You can imagine cab drivers that are trying to pay off $120,000 medallion are looking at 3.4 million going, Fuck me, how are we going to pay this? And the government says, we’re not done, we’re not done. You know that money you actually made? And they’re like Yeah.

00:39:17:53 – 00:39:43:17
Keith
Yeah. They’re like, Yeah, we figured it’s about $161,000 and they’re like, Was it? We didn’t think it was that much. And the government was like, Yeah, yeah, it was $161,000. We want that back too. And they were like, fuck. Okay, so now they’re facing not only five years, but they’re assuming they can sweat that out. They’re looking at millions of dollars in restitution.

00:39:43:17 – 00:40:04:33
Keith
And if you’ve followed any of these episodes, I’m bringing you weekly. My big thing is how do people pay these things? Because even if you get out of prison and you’re like, I served my time, and even if you can get a job, if people overlook the fact that you’re an ex-con, how do you pay that amount of money?

00:40:04:33 – 00:40:28:58
Keith
It’s just mind boggling. So that’s what the government was. They got many millions of dollars in restitution. They want them to forfeit the money that they made and they want five years basically a little less for Leymen. So Daniel’s attorney gets up there and they’re like, holy shit, that’s a lot of money. And that’s a lot of time.

00:40:29:03 – 00:40:56:12
Keith
We don’t know what to say. We don’t know what to say. We’re just going to ask for 12 months of home confinement. And then I’m sure the judge kind of raised their eyebrow. The attorney was like, oh you want an explanation? Okay, We want home confinement so he can begin to pay off $3 million because who the fuck is going to be able to pay this in any circumstance, let alone if you’re an ex-con, okay?

00:40:56:12 – 00:41:21:01
Keith
And the judge was like, okay, I hear what you had to say. Go ahead and sit down. I will listen to the other party being, you know, the other defendant here. So then Peter Peter’s, attorney gets up and goes, Did they just ask for a home confinement? And the judge is like, Yeah, yeah. They asked for a home confinement on five years and they go, Well, shit, we did less than him.

00:41:21:02 – 00:41:38:16
Keith
We want home confinement too. Why would we ask for anything more than home confinement if he’s asking for it? And the judge is like, are you sure? Is that what you’re asking for is home confinement? He’s like, Yes. We also have to pay off $3 million. How are we going to pay it off if we’re in jail? Please put us in home confinement.

00:41:38:20 – 00:42:00:13
Keith
And this is the point where I learned about all the debt that he owed, which was $120,000 and the medallion and stuff, and I was just like, Holy shit, no wonder why he wants home confinement, because he owes a ton of money. And they’re like, Listen, he is struggling. Struggling. The only reason why he went down this path is because he was struggling.

00:42:00:18 – 00:42:27:19
Keith
He was just trying to pay off all these things any way he can. Uber and Lyft, they are breathing down their neck as yellow taxi cab drivers. COVID was there. They owed all this money on the medallions and things. He was just in financial distress and unfortunately he made a split second bad decision. And I kind of thought in my mind, well, maybe the first time, but he did it for two fucking years.

00:42:27:19 – 00:42:55:02
Keith
Okay. So yeah, a it’s kind of hard. It’s kind of hard to say he didn’t know it. So they said, Yeah, we realize that we’re asking for less than the five years that the government wanted, and three years that I think the guidelines recommended. But we just want a home confinement because that fucker asked for it. And the judge went, okay, I heard the government and I heard both defendants in this case.

00:42:55:02 – 00:43:23:42
Keith
Let me think for a minute. How about four years? And I went, okay, okay, four years for Daniel. And I was like, okay, okay. For Daniel. That kind of make sense. He was the mastermind in this. And then the judge came back and said, But we’ll do two years for Peter. And I was like, Thank God, because it sounds like Daniel was the mastermind.

00:43:23:42 – 00:43:31:02
Keith
And if you were to sentence them both exactly the same, I think you’re kind of sending the message that they both did the same amount of crime here.

00:43:31:02 – 00:43:59:53
Keith
So basically four years for Daniel, two years for Peter Leyman, and they were both sentenced for the same amount of supervised release, which was three years. And the judge says you both are on the hook for this $3.45 million that you owe in restitution. And you both have to give up your $161,000 that you made in this scheme.

00:43:59:58 – 00:44:05:41
Keith
Whew. So that’s a pretty hard time, right?

00:44:05:41 – 00:44:20:46
Keith
So some final thoughts here. You know, two years when I looked at it originally, I was like, yeah, that felt about right for Leyman in this case. Four years I was like, that’s border that’s pushing on the line of being kind of stiff.

00:44:20:51 – 00:44:40:32
Keith
Yeah, yeah. You know, there was a lot of money and a lot of time went by here but you look at it and when you when you put it against the time that other people had served in other episodes that I brought to you, which is really my only frame of reference when I bring you the end of these cases.

00:44:40:32 – 00:45:05:04
Keith
It’s frame of reference with other cases that I’ve talked to you about weekly. And when I look at it compared to that, I’m like, Yeah, four years for this crime. That’s kind of stiff, right? That’s kind of stiff. That’s getting up there with the people that had tax issues or tried to exploit the IRS by fraudulently filing tax returns.

00:45:05:09 – 00:45:26:52
Keith
But this is $10 at a time skipping the taxicab line, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but ends up being a lot at the end of the day and screws over a ton of people that actually waited their turn in that line and lost out on all that revenue that they can be making like these people right now.

00:45:26:57 – 00:45:55:48
Keith
Whereas the prison kind of felt right maybe just a little much, but right. The restitution. My God, did that feel like it was just off, that it was just stratospheric, in my opinion, because the dispatch system, this is just the Keith Jones opinion, they should be on the hook for some of that money for fixing and upgrading the systems.

00:45:55:48 – 00:46:19:16
Keith
That’s just daily maintenance and improvements in their security posture. Right. You can’t go to the first hack in your system and go, hey, the millions of dollars we spent on upgrading our systems, you now owe us for. That doesn’t seem right. And that’s in my opinion, kind of what they did in this case based on what I read in the court documentation.

00:46:19:21 – 00:46:45:45
Keith
So if you were to subtract those fixes out and then say that’s the restitution, then I could kind of buy that’s a little being a little more fair because you can’t you can’t expect a couple of cab drivers at the end of the day to spend or be able to to pay restitution on millions of dollars. I just I don’t see it happening.

00:46:45:50 – 00:47:06:49
Keith
And the other two that are in Russia again, I’ll say it again, but I’m saying here in my last final thoughts, I think they’re going to stay free if they stay in Russia and Russia never agrees to extradite their people. They’re probably going to stay in Russia. And not ever face charges like we saw the two in this case that they did.

00:47:06:54 – 00:47:34:36
Keith
Now, here’s a footnote I wanted to save for the very end for those of you that watched. This is not the first time this has happened. Now, apparently this dispatch system had been hacked other times. And the hackers in those cases charged more to jump the line. And in this case, the criminals in this case, they said, hey, we got to kind of undercut these other people.

00:47:34:49 – 00:47:59:41
Keith
We’re only going to charge $10 to jump the line. And that was how they made the money in this case. I didn’t want to confuse the issue with you and say that there were other hackers out there and stuff during this case. But I do want to tell you now that this wasn’t the first time it happened. And this is kind of why I was like, are you really going to charge them restitution of millions of dollars if other groups are known to do this against this dispatch system?

00:47:59:52 – 00:48:28:15
Keith
I think somewhere along the lines this is… you can’t just charge this group with this restitution because it’s just I’m going to stop there. I’m going to stop there. If you enjoyed this episode, which I hope you did, please like and subscribe if you’re on YouTube, if you’re on the other platforms catching this, please follow, thumbs up, whatever it is on your platform, whatever the positive affirmation is, I appreciate it.

00:48:28:19 – 00:48:49:46
Keith
That just helps get this video and audio in front of other people that might enjoy true crime with an electronic spin that’s not serious. I tell you serious, truthful things, but I tell it to you in a not serious tone. Okay, So if you like that, please just do that for me. I’m not going to ask you to buy anything or anything else.

00:48:49:46 – 00:49:10:50
Keith
Just resharing and liking and following and subscribing that does wonders in getting these type of videos in front of new a new audience that wouldn’t have known about it without your help. And I appreciate it so much. So with that, I hope you come back. Next week we’re going to pick another just bonkers case like this and go through it and hopefully have a little fun with it.

00:49:10:55 – 00:49:14:06
Keith
So I hope to see you then. Thanks. Bye.

00:49:14:06 – 00:49:24:06