Hacker News

I imagine the general assumption is that you don't realize that you've been ID'ed. That they traveled before and nothing happened so traveling again isn't a big deal because all the "tricks" they used to cover their tracks worked.

I would imagine that is lot more likely that is just only the official story rather than what actually happens behind the scenes in these situations.

In the background there could be deals with the countries protecting them or with the target directly or a existing deal they had is off now. It may even be unrelated, wasn't worth expending the diplomatic capital before, but they are a connection to someone else more important and so on.

It could also be the targets were captured in a illegal way, no country wants to be diplomatically humiliated and the prosecuting one wouldn't want to disclose their covert ops capabilities.

Announced News is more often only a Press Release, we shouldn't be taking them literally.

From the other point of view, the abundance of stories when the high-profile criminal was catched doing something stupid, and the relative absence of ones when the criminal was catched in some clever way may mean the law enforcement is doing their job poorly.

Hypothetically, how would someone know there was a warrant out for their arrest in another country? That doesn’t seem like public information.

I figure most cyber criminals assume they are untraceable until they get arrested.

The human brain is just really bad at evaluating risk, especially over long periods of time. A lot of people are wanted overseas for years or even decades without anything happening, which makes it hard to maintain the mindset of being at risk without falling back to "eh, I've been fine this long"; a lot of them do foreign travel anyway and get away with it, which makes it hard to not fall into "what's one more vacation to a extradition-friendly country".

How can you ID these guys if they get a new passport. Changed hairstyle and do some surgery to the face?

When you're living in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine (Donetsk), I can see why you might run that risk.

Just look at the profile pics of these people and you'll get the answer. They like to show bling, have a perceived invulnerability shield around them, and like to spend the ill gotten gains.

Italian and Greek airports: the bane of otherwise untouchable slavic cybercriminals since 1994

> Sources close to the investigation say Yuriy Igorevich Rybtsov, a 41-year-old from the Russia-controlled city of Donetsk, Ukraine

I don't think it was casual traveling but getting out of a wartorn country.

Those 2 pictures were of a different hacker, not of MrICQ.

This is how I want to picture Russian hackers and they didn’t disappoint.

Straight out of the 2001 film Swordfish

> unpopular opinion, but what is the point of having borders, countries and legal systems if they are all connected into one global unit giving merely an illusion of separation to groups of people?

You didn't state an opinion (unpopular or otherwise), you asked a question.

But the question is very much like asking why have defined property rights, property lines, fences, etc., when people still engage in voluntary trade and other interactions.