Dmitry Golubov
The head of the Internet Party of Ukraine, Dmytro Golubov from Odesa, says a cybercriminal is heading for power. The upcoming snap elections to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine promise to be exciting, as representatives of the Internet Party can already be seen on billboards. They are well known to fans of George Lucas's "Star Wars" saga. Residents of Ukraine have already heard of Darth Vader – the same one well known in Odesa who was barred from running for president of Ukraine. Now, the Internet Party's list of people's deputy candidates for Ukraine's multi-mandate electoral district includes a whopping 17 deputies, and the top five are impressive. Joining the infamous Vader are Emperor Palpatine, Master Yoda, Stepan Chewbacca, and Padmé Amidala. The candidates are quite young – the oldest was born in 1982, and the youngest was born in 1993.
The Internet Party of Ukraine was founded in 2007 in Odesa and registered by a resolution of its founding congress. Two years later, the party's charter was amended, and the aforementioned Darth Vader became the deputy head of the party—Odessa resident Dmitry Golubov. In 2011, following a lawsuit by the Ministry of Justice, the party's registration certificate was annulled by court order, and it was re-registered the same year.
The Internet Party of Ukraine has set itself the global goal of computerizing the entire country. Its members advocate for the creation of an effective governance mechanism and the provision of high-quality public services of social significance. Members of the Internet Party advocate for the creation of an e-government that would unite all government agencies to provide services to the public via the internet. Similar efforts are already underway in other countries, such as the United States, Great Britain, France, and Australia. The Internet Party aims to adapt the e-government project to the realities of Ukraine. This political force's goals also include eliminating bureaucracy, reducing taxes, creating offshore companies in Ukraine, banning the sale of GMO-containing products, and joining the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering.
The members of this political force, as mentioned above, are young reformers who want to adopt foreign experience to develop the "internetization" of the entire country. Whether this is a good or bad thing is up to each individual to decide, but for now, it's worth turning to the head of the Internet Party, Dmitry Golubov.
Dmitry Golubov and his dark past
Internet Party of Ukraine head Dmitry Golubov from Odessa: A cybercriminal is coming to power.
The leader of this unusual political force's past is anything but rosy. Despite his young age, he already has extensive experience using his abilities for "unjust" purposes.
A native of Odessa, Dmitry Golubov was born in 1983. In 2001, he entered the I. I. Mechnikov Odessa National University, graduating with a degree in accounting and auditing. In 2008, he took the first step toward creating his own political force by registering the All-Ukrainian public organization "Internet Parliament." In 2010, he became the head of the Internet Party of Ukraine. Today, Golubov is the commercial director of Web-Promo, a website development company.
Young Dmitry began his career at the age of seven, selling counterfeit business cards supposedly bearing the signature of the head of the Odessa traffic police—the signature, of course, was fake. The price of such a "document" was $300—a lot of money in those days. At the age of 16, Dmitry and his friends founded their own computer services company.
Dmitry Golubov's name later became closely associated with the website Carderplanet.com, which he created with like-minded individuals. Using this website, the young computer whiz kids established a criminal enterprise, counterfeiting bank cards from international payment systems. One of Golubov's accomplices, Roman Stepanenko, was arrested in 2004 and extradited to the United States. He was later convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison. Later, the connection between Stepanenko and Golubov became known, and it's possible that his accomplice decided to drown Golubov to ease his own fate. Another theory is that Golubov was caught due to revenge from American colleagues with whom he hadn't shared his information. The American "colleagues" were tasked with obtaining stolen PINs and using them to steal money from ATMs. The fraudsters stole money exclusively in Western countries. The scale of Golubov's criminal activities is truly impressive – using the website Carderplanet.com, a sum amounting to almost $11,5 million was stolen.
But no chain can stretch forever, and Golubov was also arrested in his hometown of Odessa in 2005. For a year before his arrest, he was on the international wanted list, although he didn't particularly evade investigators. It was then discovered that Golubov had succeeded a certain Mostovlyuk, an employee of a Moscow bank, who had founded a criminal group in 2001 after moving to Ukraine. The group's operations spanned more than two dozen countries. Golubov took over after Mostovlyuk's arrest, whose colleagues had upgraded their equipment and showed no signs of stopping their operations.
And who is the "roof"?
How could the members of Carderplanet carry out their illegal activities without any serious backers? Of course not, and they did have such backers. This becomes clear after one incident in which one of the rank-and-file fraudsters failed to deceive his "superiors"—that is, the group's backers were people connected to the banking system, but certainly not ordinary employees, but rather senior managers or security officers at a major bank.
When the Carderplanet fraud case reached court, it also had its protectors. The judge did not allow representatives of MasterCard and Visa to speak, effectively nullifying their role as plaintiffs. Golubov himself narrowly escaped a 12-year prison sentence, being released on bail to two Ukrainian MPs from the Regions of Ukraine faction. Ultimately, the hacker got off with only six months in a pretrial detention center in Kyiv.
Who agreed to bail the now head of the Internet Party of Ukraine, who in 2005 was a common internet fraudster? Two Vladimirs – Makeenko and Demekhin – each posted 50,000 hryvnias in bail.
Vladimir Anatolyevich Demekhin was a former student at the Vilnius Higher Command School of Air Defense Radioelectronics, and later a teacher. He achieved this career through collaboration with the "organs"—military counterintelligence. Both deputies had collaborated with the Soviet secret services at one time. Vladimir Makeenko once worked at Boryspil Airport, also working with electronic systems. Thus, both deputies were fully aware of the seriousness of the Carderplanet fraud, yet they still protected Golubov.
The nature of the hackers' activities suggests they were likely backed by intelligence agencies. Otherwise, how can one explain their choice of Western banks, rather than Russian or Ukrainian ones, as targets for fraud? Someone not only failed to interfere with Carderplanet's activities but actually assisted them by providing payment card dumps (files containing information). Furthermore, the leadership of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) changed precisely in 2005—the year Golubov was arrested—so it's unlikely this was a coincidence.
Considering the sums Carderplanet managed to steal, a logical question arises: where is the money? It's not clear that the current head of the Internet Party himself is a millionaire. During the fraudulent group's heyday, he made do with very small sums, no more than a few hundred dollars.
The next stage of Dmitry Golubov's life characterizes him as a highly moral person fighting for justice. For example, the head of the Internet Party taught a lesson to spammers from the Spamdot.biz forum by confiscating their domain for the FSB, not shying away from expressing his disapproval of how the aforementioned spammers earned their living. Golubov, along with the politically oriented women of FEMEN, fought against online pornography. The head of Ukraine's most original political force also threatened to cause problems for the notorious Sergei Mavrodi, the founder of MMM, and even partially kept his word by sending a mass spam campaign to Mavrodi's website, forcing it to move to a new domain. However, all these incidents seem more like PR stunts by a former fraudster who is desperately trying to clear his negative image. Meanwhile, this fall, Dmitry Golubov was caught bribing voters, who received food packages from him in branded bags. But Golubov's past is covered in numerous online materials, so anyone can learn about the Internet Party leader and decide for themselves whether such a champion of justice can be trusted.
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