Russian stock market hacker’s Boston case closed after prisoner swap

Vladimir Putin’s buddy got away with ripping off capitalism.

The U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston has announced that the stock market hacking case against Vladislav Klyushin, 42, of Moscow, is closed. He was sent home this summer in a massive prisoner swap.

“His case is over,” Boston defense attorney Maksim Nemtsev told the Herald Friday after the appeal of Klyushin’s guilty verdict was dismissed.

That dismissal states: “The President (Joe Biden) issued an Executive Grant of Clemency on July 26 … in which he commuted defendant-appellant’s nine-year sentence to time served. As a result of the Grant, defendant-appellant submitted a letter to this court in which he represented that he ‘will not take further action on his appeal.’ … this appeal is dismissed.”

Klyushin was sentenced last year to nine years in federal prison. He was found guilty of a $34 million computer hack of the stock market. That cyber infiltration included gaining advance notice of Tesla’s “positive” quarterly draft earnings that allowed him to purchase stock to watch his shares “go up,” court records state.

But Klyushin was part of a massive prisoner swap this summer that included Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, a corporate security executive from Michigan who was a former U.S. Marine.

Klyushin was also ordered to pay restitution, but that is now up in the air.

His lawyer told the Herald the “financial conditions remain” and the feds could seize his assets, but Klyushin is free to roam the world — except for the U.S. — and going after his money would be “difficult.”

“A condition of his clemency requires him to not come into the U.S. without permission,” said attorney Nemtsev. “He can travel the world.”

Attorney Nemtsev added the Boston jury was out for four days in the case and now all their work is moot.

Klyushin has ties to Putin and the country’s military and spy networks, according to court records.

“The defendant is accordingly an individual with significant ties to the Russian government, and, more specifically, to parts of the Russian government engaged in defense and counter-espionage,” a memo in his case file states.

He hacked into U.S. computers hunting for any advantage on what stocks to buy or sell and the timing of it all in “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 when explaining why Klyushin was prosecuted here and held in the Plymouth federal prison.

Klyushin was arrested in Sion, Switzerland, in March of 2021 “minutes after he arrived by private jet … (as) a helicopter had been waiting on the tarmac to take him and his party to Zermatt, an exclusive ski resort nearby,” the pre-trial memo stated.

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

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