Today we’ll return to a figure that’s been living in my head rent-free ever since I wrote about him earlier in the year - the infamous cybercriminal Vladislav Horohorin, also known as BadB.
My April article on him went into his wartime employment by Ukrainian military intelligence (HUR). He is a major figure in Ukraine’s anti-Russian scamming and hacking operations, playing a key role in the military’s ‘IT army’. In interviews, he boasts of the fact that the Russian databases he has hacked into have allowed Ukrainian scam call centers to steal over 2 billion USD from Russian citizens over the past few years.
Horohorin’s current Ukrainian nationalist look, 2023
This is quite amusing, since Horohorin and his hacker community were at their height in Moscow in the 2000s. Nowadays, Horohorin claims to have always hated the Russian government, but the NYT’s description seems to be at odds with that:
Underscoring the nationalistic tone of much of Russian computer crime, one site featured a cartoon of the Russian prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, awarding medals to Russian hackers. “We awaiting you to fight the imperialism of the U.S.A.” the site said, in approximate English.
Horohorin in the 2000s
In recent interviews, Horohorin also does a weak job of denying allegations he came to an understanding with the Russian FSB.
Nowadays, the HUR certainly isn’t the only agency he is loyal to. He also clearly cooperated with the FBI as part of the plea deal that reduced his fraud sentence to only seven years.
Another particularly interesting aspect of the BadB story is his cyber-criminal ties with one of the most powerful men in the country at the moment, head of Zelensky’s parliamentary fraction David Arakhamia.
Anyway, to reacquaint the reader, here’s a brief overview of Mr Horohorin from the good professor wikipedia:
Vladislav Horohorin (Ukrainian: Владислав Анатолійович Хорохорін, romanised: Vladyslav Anatoliiovych Khorokhorin), alias BadB, is a former hacker and international credit card trafficker who was convicted[1] of wire fraud and served a seven-year prison sentence.
Early life
Horohorin was born on September 29, 1982, and grew up in Donetsk, Ukraine, emigrating in 1999 to Israel with his mother, where he served in the Israeli Defence Forces.
Investigation
According to the undercover investigation led by the United States Secret Service, Horohorin was one of the founders of CarderPlanet, one of several websites taken down[2] in 2004, as part of the Secret Service's Operation Firewall investigation. The web sites were operated by cyber criminal organizations to traffic counterfeit credit cards, and false identification information and documents. These websites not only shared information on how to commit fraud, but also provided a forum through which to purchase fraud-related information and tools.
"The network created by the founders of CarderPlanet, including Vladislav Horohorin, remains one of the most sophisticated organizations of online financial criminals in the world," said Michael Merritt, Assistant Director for Investigations. "This network has been repeatedly linked to nearly every major intrusion of financial information reported to the international law enforcement community. This arrest illustrates the significance of the Secret Service's commitment to traversing the globe in pursuit of online criminals."[3]
Horohorin promoted his illegal activities by creating video cartoons ridiculing American card holders.[4]
Separately, in 2013, Horohorin was named co-conspirator in an indictment, but was not subsequently charged, in a criminal case in District of New Jersey 09-626 (JBS), in which other Russian individuals were charged with successfully hacking Nasdaq, 7-Eleven, Carrefour, JCPenney, Heartland Payment Systems, Dow Jones, Jetblue and 23 more corporations.[5][6] This breach was called the "Largest known data breach conspiracy ever prosecuted" by the U.S. Justice Department.[7] As of April 2017, none of Horohorin's co-conspirators had been sentenced.[8][7]
I’ve taken a look at some of Khorokhin’s interviews with the Ukrainian youtube channel ‘HackYourMom’. The first is from 2024, and the second is from February 2025, with a total time of over four hours.
They include some quite interesting information. On the more banal level, he confirms ‘withdrawing more than 9 million from ATMs in 280 cities worldwide in less than 12 hours’, the crime that put him in jail.
But more interestingly, he has much to say on his involvement with the American FBI and Israeli military intelligence.
He also talks about how he got interested in hacking as a teen in Israel - porn. He also waxes nostalgic about one of his pioneering scams in early 2000s Israel - the so-called ‘phone sex’ trick’. He seemed to have gone a bit too far when he successfully hacked the IDF while serving in order to create fake medical leave certificates (a relatively angelic crime by IDF standards).
However, for ‘some strange reason’, the army never tried him for the crime.
This confusing fact will help us understand Horohorin’s various hints and admissions regarding his relationship with Israeli military intelligence. Specifically, the secretive unit 8200.
In future installments of this series, this will allow us to better put in context Horohorin’s cooperation with the FBI. And of course, we will be able to better appreciate the figure of David Arakhamia, the web template mogul also associated with Horohorin’s cybercrime syndicate, who nowadays is the leader of Zelensky’s parliamentary fraction.
Israel - from jerking off to hacking on
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