Boston Stock Hacker Who Participated in Prisoner Swap Caught

A Russian millionaire businessman sentenced to nine years in prison in Boston for a massive stock market hack was freed this week in a prisoner swap, with his local lawyer saying he may not have to pay restitution.

Vladislav Klyushin, a 42-year-old from Moscow who has ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and the country’s military and spy networks, “participated in the exchange” and “President Biden’s clemency” is unclear about any reparations he still owes America, Boston lawyer Maksim Nemtsev told the Herald.

“The question remains whether he will have to pay compensation,” Nemtsev said on Friday.

The extensive court material against Klyushin shows that he is not an ordinary Russian citizen.

“The defendant is not just one of the approximately 144 million citizens of Russia,” the pretrial detention note states. “He is the holder of the Medal of Honor, presented below, awarded in June 2020 by President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin.”

The photo and others depicting key events in Russia — including a photo “commemorating Mikhail Kalashnikov,” the inventor of the AK assault weapon — show him shaking hands with key figures in his government, court documents show.

“The accused is therefore an individual with significant ties to the Russian government, and more specifically to elements of the Russian government involved in defense and counterintelligence,” the memo added, saying he had always posed a “significant flight risk.”

Klyushin was sentenced to nine years in federal prison last year. He was found guilty of hacking the stock market for $34 million. That cyberinfiltration included getting advance notice of Tesla’s “positive” quarterly earnings report draft, allowing him to buy shares to watch them “go up,” according to court records.

They hacked into American computers in an attempt to gain any advantage they could over what stocks to buy or sell, and when, as part of a “global get-rich-quick scheme,” the FBI said.

Many of the illegally obtained earnings reports were downloaded through a computer server located in downtown Boston, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said, explaining why Klyushin was prosecuted in this country and held at a federal prison in Plymouth.

“Mr. Klyushin hacked into U.S. computer networks to obtain confidential corporate information that he used to illegally make money on the U.S. stock market,” Acting United States Attorney Joshua S. Levy said in September 2023. “He thought he could avoid punishment for his crimes by committing them from an offshore base, hiding behind layers of fake domain names, virtual private networks, and computer servers rented under pseudonyms and paid for with cryptocurrency. He learned otherwise.”

Klyushin was arrested in Sion, Switzerland, in March 2021 “minutes after he arrived on a private jet… (while) a helicopter was waiting on the tarmac to take him and his group to Zermatt, an exclusive ski resort nearby,” a pretrial memo said.

He had a “safe box full of cash,” a luxury yacht worth $3.97 million and a property in London, court documents say. But now he’s free to sail again.

Ironically, the pretrial memo was signed by then-Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins, who resigned amid scandal after a series of ethics violations.

The Kremlin admitted on Friday that some of the Russians included in the exchange belonged to the Kremlin’s security services, the Associated Press reported.

The AP added that while journalists Evan Gershkovich and Alsou Kurmasheva and former Marine Paul Whelan were greeted by their families and President Joe Biden in Maryland on Thursday evening, Putin hugged each of the returning Russians at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport and promised them state awards and “a lecture about their future.”

Klyushin was in this group.