The US Department of Justice has announced the indictment of Denis Gennadievich Kulkov, a Russian citizen who allegedly ran a stolen credit card checking service dubbed Try2Check that generated at least $18 million in crypto, excluding payments received through other payment options.
The service itself was taken down on May 3 in a joint operation between the US government and units in the Austrian Criminal Intelligence Service, the German Federal Criminal Police Office, the German Federal Office for Information Security and the French Central Directorate of the Judicial Police (DCPJ).
Try2Check was commonly used by cybercriminals who dealt with the bulk purchase and sale of stolen credit cards to check what percentage of the stolen cards were valid and active, before using this information to sell their stolen wares to other cybercriminals. According to the US Department of Justice, Kulkov created the website in 2005, abusing the systems of a prominent US payment processing firm to run the checks.

The site ran tens of millions of credit card checks per year, supporting operations of major card shops that made hundreds of millions in profits in Bitcoin. Over a nine-month period in 2018, Try2Check ran at least 16 million checks, only to be trumped by a 13-month period beginning in September 2021 where the site ran 17 million checks.
In addition to unsealing the charging documents in the case and taking down Try2Check’s websites, the State Department has issued a $10 million reward through the Transnational Organised Crime Rewards Program (TOCRP) for information leading to Kulkov’s capture, who currently resides in Russia. If convicted, Kulkov faces 20 years in prison.
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