Thursday, March 29, 2018

Russians, Identity Theft, and Campaign Interference

These funds, originating in Russian government grants, were used to fund campaign interference operations in the U.S. The Russians moved the money into the U.S. banking system by using unwitting Americans to establish bank accounts and PayPal accounts.

Through these accounts, the Russians funded their campaign disruption activities.

While most people understand identity theft as a method used to break into somebody's personal bank accounts and credit accounts in order steal that person's assets, or establish a new credit card and run up debt for the unknowing victim, the Russians employed a far more clever identity theft scheme: using the personal information of real Americans, they opened up new bank accounts using people's valid information.

Since these PayPal accounts were set up using legitimate bank accounts, no one suspected anything.

The cleverness is that the identities were used to establish new accounts, and the Russians always put money into these accounts.

The Mueller indictment lists only eight people who were exploited in 2015 and 2016 whose identity information was used by the Russians to set up PayPal accounts.

In order to conceal the Russian origin of the acts - those 13 defendants indicted for interference with the 2016 election - the Russians had to disguise the identity of the persons behind the activities and carefully conceal the origin of the money used.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/03/russians_identity_theft_and_campaign_interference.html 

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