Sergei Pavlovich, known as Policedog, sheds light on the community accused of aggressive activity on behalf of the Kremlin

According to Sergei Pavlovich, one of the Russian-speaking world’s most notorious hackers, “it is easier to hack an electoral system than eBay or Citibank”.

The Belarusian cyber-criminal known as Policedog online started hacking early on, and by the age of 20 he says he was earning $100,000 a month as a “carder”, turning stolen credit card information into cash. By the early 2000s he was one of the leading figures in the Russian and Eastern European cyber-underworld.

In an exclusive interview Pavlovich, now 33 and with a 10-year jail term behind him, gives a rare insight into a community that has been accused of carrying out aggressive cyber-activity on behalf of the Kremlin.

Allegations that the Russian government deliberately hacked Democratic party emails to try to steer Donald Trump to victory in the US presidential election have been rebutted by the now president and denounced as “baseless” and “amateurish” by the Kremlin.

While Pavlovich says he won’t comment directly on the US election hacking allegations he does say it is getting easier to access government organisations across the world thanks to the help of new apps being developed every day.

That is coupled with the fact that “everything that is created by a human can be destroyed. You can create the most perfect system of computer protection but wrongdoers will ring the administrator and, using some excuse, get the admin password out of them.” This exercise is made easier by the fact that people often use identical passwords for all of their accounts, he adds.

According to Pavlovich “the hardest things to hack are commercial banks, online payment systems, processing centres, ATM machine networks, dumps with pins and large commercial portals like eBay”, because they can afford to hire more qualified specialists to keep their systems secure.



Not that it has stopped the “Russian hackers [who] have at some point hacked all of those things – many I saw with my own eyes”, he adds.

He considers his former cohorts some of the best in the world. “They don’t work by instructions or according to the rules: they have an unusual approach and they find a way to hack things very quickly.”

Pavlovich admits his hacking skills measure up pretty poorly to others these days – he was more focused on helping hackers “cash-out” buying and selling financial details. He thinks he would only be able to break into poorly defended organisations – like the Democratic party.

Since his release in 2015 Pavlovich says he has stopped all his cybercrime activities; he has written a book called How to Steal a Million, inspired by his experiences, and has set up several businesses, including a fish delivery service and a company that sells souvenir mock-ups of US dollar bills.

Growing up in Minsk, he got involved in cybercrime aged 13. His family had a computer at home, and his step-father “was a businessman who drank away all the money”.

He bought credit card details online – for about $1 a card – and used them to make purchases from internet shops. He bought up computer parts, TVs and other electronics scarce in former Soviet countries.

When he started out, he says, he and many other Russian-speaking hackers did not consider what they were doing as criminal. “It was a game,” he said.

Just like today’s hackers and cybercriminals, Pavlovich used online forums to perfect his craft.

The site was set up in Ukraine in 2001 and was described by the cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs as “the most brazen collection of carders, hackers and cyberthieves the internet had ever seen”.

Almost all the stolen credit card details they used belonged to people in the United States, explains Pavlovich. This reduced the likelihood of local police attention but it also made crimes appear victimless – as insurance covered customer losses.

“Call it being patriotic, if you will. I don’t remember when we adopted the rule, but it was a rule everyone respected: never steal from your people,” he adds.

A version of this article first appeared in the Moscow Times.