Roman Seleznev, a notorious Russian computer hacker, was arrested and tried for more than 400 point-of-sale hacks and at least $169 million in credit card fraud.

The outcome of the trial was a sentence of 27 years and restitution of $170 million.

Seleznev started his criminal activity in the early 2000s when he started selling stolen information. According to Norman Barbosa, assistant US attorney, by 2005, he advanced into the credit card market. This alerted the Secret Service who to start investigation him and by 2009, had identified him by name.

Seleznev vanished.

Seleznev reappeared that same year using the handles of Track2 and Bulba on sites that sold credit card data and was listed as a "trusted vendor of dumps." The Secret Service realized it was not a new player and reopened their investigation.

Seleznev's next activity involved hacking restaurants and stealing credit card data from their point-of-sale devices.

Seleznev was arrested in the Maldives in 2014 and instead of taking months if not years to get an extradition order, the Secret Service went to the Maldives and got the order in three days.

Seleznev's laptop was seized and authorities found 1.7 million credit card numbers. One of Seleznev's screw ups was to reuse passwords on multiple accounts. That made it easy for authorities to get into his laptop.

Seleznev had two email accounts linked to his aliases. One was used for personal activity. He used that one to order flowers for his wife and used his real name and phone number. Authorities used that to track back to him.

Source: Dark Reading