A 37-year-old Pavel Kublitskii, who ran a major Russian-language WWH Club hacker resource, was detained in Florida. The police also issued an arrest warrant for Alexander Khodyrev, a Kazakh citizen involved in the project.
Kublitskii has already been detained, however further actions of the investigation on the second administrator, Khodyrev, are still unknown.
The court documents show that the FBI agent in 2023, disguised as a regular user, purchased a carding guide for $1000 and took the course with 50 other participants for 1.5 months to understand the structure from the inside. The site also provided numerous offers of illegal services, including selling stolen credit card data, guides to stealing funds from bank accounts, conducting various DDoS attacks, etc. At the same time, users were banned from committing crimes on the territory of CIS countries.
Back in the summer of 2020, FBI agents found that the domain wwh-club.ws referred to IP addresses belonging to the cloud provider DigitalOcean, and with the help of a court search warrant obtained a copy of the server.
FBI specialists then restored a working copy of the forum to view as an administrator and obtained data on tens of thousands of emails, passwords and activity of users registered on WWH-Club. At that time, the forum had about 170,000 registered users, 29 moderators, 30 staff members, and 7 administrators.
Interesting fact: the court documents say that the FBI used Google Translate in the Chrome browser to read the site:
As a result, the FBI got enough evidence to believe that Kublitskii and Khodyrev were acting as administrators of WWH Club and Skynetzone. The court documents provide a thorough analysis of the connections of a large number of emails, phone numbers linked to iCloud, IP addresses, cryptocurrency wallets, and transactions.
Google also provided the FBI with records, under a federal warrant, on various Gmail email accounts. One of the emails associated with WWH Club contained personal photos of the account user, travel documents, and IDs, which confirmed the account belonged to Kublitskii.
It is worth noting that in 2022, the defendants came to the United States and requested political asylum. Kublitsky and Khodyrev were officially considered unemployed, however, led a lavish lifestyle. Thus, Kublitsky rented a large apartment in Miami, and Khodyrev bought a Chevrolet Corvette for $110 thousand.
It is also interesting that Kublitskii was previously one of the managers of the financial pyramid – MMM-2011 in Russia.
At the moment there are direct accusations against Pavel Kublitskii, and there is an investigation regarding the activities of Alexander Khodyrev.
At the same time, WWH Club continues to work and it has already published information stating that the accused were only moderators:
- Court documents: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.672601/gov.uscourts.flsd.672601.1.0.pdf
- More information: here.
