30 Jan 2023; MEMO: The Israeli hacker behind "one of the biggest cybercrimes in history" has returned to Israel, his father has revealed in an interview broadcast in the Republic of Georgia.
Gery Shalon was arrested in 2015 and charged by the US authorities of taking part in a stock manipulation scheme. The charges were reported to be linked to the hacking of JP Morgan and other banks in a scam involving hundreds of millions of dollars. The indictment alleged that he personally stashed at least $100 million in a Swiss bank account and other accounts around the world, the Wall Street Journal reported.
US Attorney Preet Bharara called it a "diversified criminal conglomerate" that reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal profits over the course of eight years.
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According to Bloomberg, Shalon pleaded guilty in 2017 in a "sealed courtroom" after being charged on 23 counts in return for a sentence that was significantly more lenient than those imposed on his accomplices. His plea deal included an agreement to forfeit more than $400 million.
Moreover, his father, Shota Shalelashvili, said that Shalon was granted his freedom in 2021 following a court session in the US and then moved back to Israel. "He is in Israel now," said Shalelashvili, "but I think he plans to go back to the US. His skills are too big for Israel."
Born in Georgia, Shalelashvili emigrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel and then moved back to Georgia in 2016. Since then, he has also returned to Israel, said Bloomberg.
Shalon and two others were charged with hacking into the servers of a dozen companies, including JPMorgan and Dow Jones & Co, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, as part of a global operation that also involved illegal Internet casinos. He was charged along with Ziv Orenstein, an Israeli citizen and Joshua Aaron, a US citizen, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
