Virginia Messi
09/18/2021 6:00 AM
Clarín.com
Police
Updated 09/18/2021 6:00 AM
Surely the Bulgarian
Plamen Stoyanov Petrov (44)
thought like this: what better than to spend a weekend skiing in Ushuaia -sliding hours and hours along the slopes of Cerro Castor- eat rich (and expensive), buy the best quality clothes and enjoy of the apartment rented for that special little trip with his Venezuelan girlfriend 20 years his junior.
And that's exactly what he did.
He arrived at Tierra del Fuego airport on an Aerolineas Argentinas plane on Friday afternoon, September 10, and spent
about 300,000 pesos in 48 hours
with different credit cards.
But things ended badly.
Petrov and his girlfriend were arrested when they were about to get on the plane that would return them to Buenos Aires.
I am accused of having paid for the luxury weekend with
cloned cards
.
Paradoxes of destiny: the department in which they spent their top weekend was located on top of a Santander Río bank.
What is said to have work close to home.
Plamen Stoyanov Petrov, detained in Ushuaia.
"We had been following him after the Red Link Fraud Prevention Department sent us an alert. Apparently one of the victims of the cloning of the card realized that something strange was happening and
reported a purchase that he had not made.
"
Commissioner Victor Cárdenas, head of the Complex Crimes Division of the Fuegian Police
, explained to
Clarín
.
The fact that in 2011 the Bulgarian was arrested in Paraguay with three compatriots accused of being part of
a gang that hacked thousands of dollars from the account of Bill Gates
(owner of Microsoft) caused the arrest in Ushuaia to occupy space in all the national media, and some international.
Bulgarian pirates
But behind Plamen Stoyanov Petrov there is a story with more ingredients than that and includes the existence of
Bulgarian gangs of hackers
who go around the world doing electronic scams and living the high life.
They are known as the "Bulgarian Super Hacker Group" and their business is almost perfect: they spend, they accumulate, they live like royalty and if they catch them, in general
the crimes of fraud are ex-jailible
, so they do not last long behind bars.
Plamen Stoyanov Petrov (in the center, with black glasses and in profile), along with the other three Bulgarians who were arrested in Paraguay for computer crimes.
Plamen himself was arrested on December 5, 2012 in Argentina, when he was about to take a flight to Panama.
He fell for a red circular
issued requested by Bulgaria for Interpol to arrest him, accused of making card scams in his country.
But after an extradition trial (there is no treaty with Bulgaria), Plamen managed to stay in Argentina and
even open a business and bring his wife and children
.
"I want to stay in Argentina, I came here in 2008 looking for new possibilities,
escaping with my family from the crisis in my country
", declared the Bulgarian before the federal judge No. 1 of Lomas de Zamora, Alberto Santa María, who in a signed resolution On October 9, 2013, he
rejected the Bulgarian extradition request
for not complying with the requirements of Argentine law.
The passport photo of the Bulgarian, who managed to avoid extradition.
The accusation by which Bulgaria wanted to try him is quite clear in the extradition request: "To have constituted and directed, during 2010 even in the town of Ravda, district of Burgas,
an organized criminal group
, that is, a lasting structured association of three or more people, to commit in coordination with each other, in the country or abroad, with a greedy purpose, crimes for which the sanction of deprivation of liberty of more than three years is foreseen. Bulgarian Penal Code and is punished with a penalty of 5 to 15 years of deprivation of liberty ".
"The central issue for which they could not take Petrov, for which we won, was, first, that Argentina does not have a treaty with Bulgaria. Second, the Bulgarians failed to forward an order issued by a judge, as required by Argentine law. There the order is issued by a prosecutor, they cannot change it and that is why the extradition was not specified, "Eduardo Barreiro Arias, lawyer for the Bulgarian in that file, detailed to this newspaper.
Before falling in Ezeiza for the red circular in 2012, Plamen Stoyanov Petrov
had escaped in 2011 from an important case in Paraguay
, where he was sentenced to just one year in prison (which he did not serve in jail) after signing a trial shortened penalty.
That was the court case that made him famous and for which he jumps in all Internet searches.
Bill Gates money
On June 14, 2011, Plamen Stoyanov Petrov (then 34 years old) was detained by agents of the Economic Crimes Division of the Paraguayan Police at the Hotel Guarany in Asunción.
With him fell Marchel Dimov Penchev (23), Konstantin Simeonov Kavranov (28) and Aleksey Kolarov Petrov (28).
The case had a lot of repercussion not only because of the credit card scams that the gang had carried out in Asunción (only in ATMs they raised
about 50,000 dollars in just a few days
) but because at least one of the detainees (Kolarov Petrov) told him about it. He pointed out as
the hacker who had managed to break into Bill Gates' account
and extract a few thousand dollars from him.
The latter defendant, the most famous, served two years in prison in Tacumbú and was later extradited to the United States, where he was awaited by
a trial for 49 scams worth several million dollars
.
The rest of his companions suffered different fates.
His girlfriend, a Venezuelan and 20 years younger, was also arrested in Ushuaia.
Konstantin Simeonov Kavranov was arrested in April 2015 in Quezon, the richest and most populous city in the Philippines.
They surprised him when he tried to use cloned credit cards to withdraw cash from different ATMs on the main avenue.
He was reported by a police informant.
As for Plamen Petrov,
everything seems to indicate that he was based in Argentina
.
His latest Bulgarian passport does not have stamps indicating trips abroad, although it is not ruled out that he has made them, with a false identity.
According to various reports by Europol, the main Bulgarian scam organization has been
operating around the world since at least 2004
.
In 2014, a joint operation between Europol, the Bulgarian State Agency for National Security and the Italian Commando Carabinieri Antifalsificazione Monetaria resulted in the arrest of 25 Bulgarian members of a gang of hackers.
The numbers of this operation are impressive: 2,000 credit cards and 250 devices were seized to violate the security of ATMs.
ACE