MOSCOW, November 4 (RIA Novosti) —The Dutch government has approved the extradition to the United State of Russian citizen Vladimir Drinkman, suspected of conducting numerous hacker attacks and stealing more than 160 million credit- and debit-card numbers, the Dutch Ministry of Justice said Tuesday as quoted by Bloomberg.
The Dutch Justice Minister Ivo Opstelten agreed to extradite Vladimir Drinkman to the US because the US submitted their request before Russia did, a spokesman of the Dutch Ministry of Justice Job van de Sande told Bloomberg.
According to the prosecution, Russians Vladimir Drinkman, Alexander Kalinin, Roman Kotov and Dmitry Smilianets and Ukrainian Mikhail Rytikov participated in a hacking scheme which went on for seven years and involved the stealing and reselling of credit card numbers, causing more than $300 million in losses. Their actions have been labeled "the largest hacking scheme ever prosecuted in the United States."
In mid-April the Court of Rotterdam made a ruling which satisfied both the US and Russian requests on Drinkman's extradition. It was left for the Ministry of Justice to decide where the Russian citizen would be extradited.
In June 2012 Drinkman and Smilianets were arrested at the request of the United States while traveling in the Netherlands. In September 2012 Smilianets was handed over to the United States where he faced the court pleading not guilty. Currently he remains under arrest. If convicted he faces decades in prison
