Late last week, one of the world’s most notorious spammers was arrested in Barcelona. But his wife claims that he’s in jail for something else as well. She claims to have seen a warrant accusing him of creating a virus that helped Donald Trump win.
On Sunday, Pyotr Levashov was arrested on an international computer crimes warrant issued by the United States. According to security expert Brian Krebs, Levashov has long been the bridge between spammers and virus writers in Russia, which has long been a haven for some of the worst people on the Web. He is suspected of creating many of these spam networks himself. He is also the suspected mastermind of two massive spam botnets, as well as a moderator of a forum that attracted Russia’s top spammers. Due to these activities, Levashov–better known as Severa–is reckoned as the seventh-worst spammer in the world by Spamhaus.
Levashov’s arrest appears to be part of a larger effort to destroy one of those botnets, Keilios. According to the Justice Department, Keilios is suspected of churning out millions of spam emails per year–a staggering figure by any standard.
Krebs has monitored Levashov for many years, and has linked him to networks that write fake antivirus software. These programs don’t do anything but bombard you with fake alerts designed to make you pay for the software–which is essentially an open invitation to install malware.
That would be enough by itself to send Levashov to jail. But Levashov’s wife, Maria Levashova, told the Russian version of the normally rabidly pro-Kremlin “news” channel RT that there was another reason why her husband was in custody.
“I asked for a warrant or some papers, they said they showed them to my husband. With my husband, I talked in the commissariat by phone, he said that he was shown some piece of paper in Spanish without a seal and his photo in poor quality. Something was said about the fact that the virus my husband allegedly created was related to Trump’s victory in the elections.”
However, the BBC, via Agence France-Presse, reports that American officials deny Levashov’s arrest has anything to do with Russia’s efforts to hack the election. For now, the indictment remains sealed.
Still, you have to wonder. Given that the Kremlin has loudly denied that it tried to influence our election, why would a Russian woman go on a fanatically pro-Kremlin network to claim that her husband had been arrested for said hacking? We won’t know for sure until the indictment is unsealed. Sounds like it will make for some interesting reading.
(featured image courtesy Mike Maguire, available under a Creative Commons-BY license)
