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Chapter 1: What is the story behind the Bayrob cybercrime operation?
Hey, it's Jack, host of the show. What a fun show this has been to make over the years. I'm having such a blast doing this. And I think this episode is one that sent me on an adventure that I'll never forget. It's a big and wild story. So let's not waste any time.
These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I'm Jack Recider. This is Darknet Diaries.
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Meet Liam. Yeah, I'm Liam Amarku. I work with Symantec and I've been there since 2004. And I work in the security response department and analyze malware. I've seen you before. Have you been on TV? I have been on TV. So I was part of the team at Symantec that analyzed Stuxnet, the virus that was infecting equipment at uranium enrichment plants in Natanz in Iran.
Yeah, you were one of the early ones to explain this is what was discovered.
That's right. We were the team that discovered what Stuxnet did, what the payload was, how it worked, how it had spread, who it was targeting. Yeah, and then because of that, I was in a documentary that was shortlisted for an Oscar in 2016 called Zero Days by Academy award-winning director Alex Gibney. So if you want to know what I do in my job, you can see it all there.
And then also Kim Zetter wrote a book about it as well. And that whole story and my work and my team's work was featured in that book as well.
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Chapter 2: How did the malware named Bayrob operate?
I'm creating the spreadsheet of all these different victims that I've identified. I'm identifying money mule accounts or IDs and money transactions, and I'm collecting all of that information.
Now, even though Stacey was new at the FBI, she was pretty sharp, especially with computers, since she was a computer programmer in the Air Force before this and was really intrigued by this case, probably more intrigued than anyone else at the time. But she knew if she was going to solve this, she was going to need more help on the investigation.
I bring in CSIPs eventually to help on the legal side. And then I end up talking with Liam again in 2012, who connects us with Owen. And at this point, I'm figuring out that this is a very sophisticated group. that we're dealing with, obviously, especially from all the work that Liam had already done.
I knew, you know, although I was on the cyber squad in Cleveland, I didn't have a super techie background, certainly a little bit, but nowhere near as much as Ryan. So I definitely needed some help on that side of things. And so I asked Ryan to work on this case with me.
Yeah, so my name's Ryan McFarlane. I'm the IR practice lead at Trusted Tech, but at the time I was a cyber agent. I was coming from DC where I spent two years at our National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force working whole of government counter operations against China and was transferring back to Cleveland and got to Cleveland and the first thing
I ended up getting asked to do was to work with Stacey on this case.
So Stacey starts bringing Special Agent Ryan up to speed on this case.
You know, I land in Cleveland and start working this case with Stacey. And I spent the first, you know, six months to a year just going after all the infrastructure that these actors were using and working with the U.S. Attorney's Office in Cleveland and CSIPS to get legal process and a ton of technical coverage on the Bay Route group.
Of course, one thing the FBI is good at is following the money. They learn that these criminals use money mules a lot. So when the criminals would trick a victim into sending them thousands of dollars, like through an eBay auction or something, the victim didn't actually send that money directly to the criminals.
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Chapter 3: What investigative techniques were used to track the Bayrob group?
So we sent them, AOL, a search warrant for all of this data. And they said, all right, this is a lot of information. Come on in, and let's explain it to you as we give you that information. So we came in. I remember it was Stacy and Brian. And it was unbelievable.
Brian, the DOJ prosecutor for this case, was thrilled.
So what we started doing at that point was we had to use legal process. We did hundreds or thousands of different legal process in this engagement, both domestically and abroad. And so once we had a sense of who one of these actors was, we had more information that we could provide to Romania. We did that through a mutual legal assistance treaty request, shortened as an MLAT.
And they started going up and doing whatever they did in Romania to try and get us helpful information pursuant to this legal process. One thing we found was the existing process of MLATs back and forth was too slow for this case. because the criminals kept changing their infrastructure.
So we had to work with our Office of International Affairs to create a faster process or an abbreviated version of the MLAT process. What they were doing is actually moving locations, right? They were moving. Well, we didn't know what they were doing. We just kept getting different IP addresses and different information. So what we discovered through Romania's response to our MLAT request was
was that there were three people that were communicating with each other, one of which was the person that Ian had identified, with encrypted communications. And we could not get through those encrypted communications, and Romania could not as well. We could see that in their home, on their non-criminal machines where they weren't encrypting all their traffic.
They were going to cryptocurrency websites and specific ones that we knew this group was focused on. But that wasn't really strong evidence. It wasn't enough to indict them or extradite them or anything else. It just made us think we had the right people.
But for quite a bit of time at that point, we're like, all right, we think we know who the three people are, but we just don't because they're encrypting everything. We don't really have enough evidence to extradite them or to indict them.
So at this point, we're going on year seven or eight of this FBI investigation.
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Chapter 4: How did the FBI collaborate with international law enforcement?
We were down in Miami, both of us, with a whole group of support people from the Miami division as well as from FBI headquarters to, as Brian said, we were going to do a search warrant on every device that he had. We were hoping it was going to be a lot of devices. It ended up not being very much. He did not have a laptop with him. He had his phone and a camera, and I think that was it.
And we had a full surveillance team on him, and he was coming into the country with another individual. So from the time he stepped on U.S. soil, we had a team that was essentially tracking his activity to see if he was making any contacts or did anything that would indicate He was part of this group.
So the FBI gets short notice of him coming to the U.S. and scrambles to come up with a plan and to meet him at the airport. What they wanted to do is look through his devices to see if they can see any evidence of him involved with this Bayrob group in order to lead to an arrest. They thought if they interrogated him, that would spook him and he'd tell the others and they'd all go into hiding.
So the plan was to somehow get a hold of his devices and search them without him knowing they got searched.
So the border patrol was actually the ones that sat down. They have to do their interview when you come through CBPS to interview you. So they did an interview with him and kind of made it take a little bit longer, but they collected his devices and then provided them to us.
We were sitting in a back room that he didn't even know there was approximately 30 people in this back room, all because of him to review his devices, to image his devices. So Customs and Border Patrol did an interview with him, collected his devices, passed them to us, so we could then have our computer forensic examiners image his devices. And he had no idea.
And then he gave it back, and he left the airport without knowing everything it copied.
He did not know, but he was pissed enough and realized that he wasn't going to do this. He was going to make this mistake again. So he was communicating with the other members of the group through a encrypted messaging app, Jabber, but it was saving logs. And he changed after this whole incident. He didn't think he was identified, but he's like, let's stop recording those logs.
And he changed his password on his phone to the Romanian for U.S. Customs can blow me.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did investigators face during the Bayrob case?
But with 30, you are the guy. You are a mighty SA.
And Danette told them a lot. One thing he said was how many other members were involved in this back in Romania. Now, as it turns out, he listed six other members and what roles they had. This was huge for the FBI to paint a full picture of this group, each member and their operations. Okay, so Danette pled guilty and he was sentenced to 10 years in prison and was cooperating.
The other two weren't talking and they were just sticking to their not guilty pleas. So it meant that this case was gonna go to trial. Now, you would think the hard part is over for the FBI and the prosecutors can take it from here, but the opposite is true. In the month before the trial, the FBI had to work harder than ever.
Well, to explain how this process works, we worked, we all worked, probably straight 30 days. You know, my wife at the time, so I've got 15-year-old triplets. And she's from Columbia. And I told her, listen, for the next month, month and a half, I'm not going to be at home. I'll be at the office pretty much the entire time. She takes the kids, heads down to Columbia.
And that's the same for all of our families, right? They didn't get to see us. We were in the office. A 10-hour day was probably a short day. This is go time.
Because now the FBI had to convince a jury that these men are guilty beyond doubt. But it's always very tricky to present electronic evidence to a jury since a lot of times they aren't very tech savvy or know what this evidence even means.
And I gotta say, the most important, I guess at the end of the day for the jury, the most important piece of evidence came from the fact that Danette, when he was cooperating, told us everybody else who worked with the Bayrob group.
And Stacey, you know, we talked with Stacey and Ryan, and we decided that there was not enough evidence to indict any of those people, because we couldn't just indict them based on one criminal saying, these are the guys, because, you know, the jury's not necessarily going to believe a criminal.
So Stacey said to me, well, why don't we just go over to Romania and talk to them and try and get them to testify? And I said, well, why would they come to the United States, risk being arrested to testify when we don't have any evidence against them? And Stacey brought up the good point. They don't know we don't have any evidence.
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Chapter 6: What evidence led to the arrest of the Bayrob members?
and the scope of the crime and we were also able to show that these guys weren't just doing their criminal job they were really sadistic they really wanted to hurt the victims for example um they developed one phishing email that was supposedly your hiv test results and when you clicked on the link you were positive it's like why would you do that
You know, I mean, like you're freaking people out way more than even the value of the money. And so I think the judge realized this was a serious group. It was a serious threat. If they get back out there, they may just start up again. And so we felt quite good. Those were some of the highest sentences you'll ever see, or at least as of that time in a cybercrime case.
And even today, it's pretty rare.
I think the other thing that is sometimes lost in this is that each one of these victims, this does something different to each one of them, right? So any one of us may lose $7,000 and we'd write it up to, man, I made a huge mistake there. But the folks that were being victimized here You know, they were folks that really couldn't afford an extra $7,000, right?
They were buying a vehicle to get to work. Some of these victims, you know, caused a lot of strife in their relationships, where, you know, one person in the relationship said, no, that sounds like a scam, don't do it, and they did it anyway, and they lost it, and it started, you know, kind of a downfall in that relationship. We had some folks that were divorced over this.
We had... What was that for? Well, because they basically disagreed that, well, when they lost the money, it caused such strife in the relationship that they... You idiot, you got scammed. Essentially.
Wow. And I want to be clear, though, like, you could be very smart and still fall for this. So two things I want to make clear. I don't know if it was clear from the background. When you went to eBay...
the malware if you were infected with the malware it would make it appear that ebay had an escrow agent protection program and you were sending the money to a ebay escrow agent who would only release the money once you got the car and were satisfied with it that was all just the malware it was a money mule but anybody would see that and think all right that sounds very safe and the urls would say ebay even it was just all malware exactly that's really sophisticated
And one of the victims who testified at trial was a used car salesman who had a dealership who would buy cars online all the time. And he fell for this too. He had a very lengthy chat with the Bayrob group, not knowing it was the Bayrob group, about this escrow agent program because he hadn't seen it before. They must have stayed on with him for an hour to convince him that this was real.
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