MOSCOW (AP) — Pyotr Levashov appeared to be just another comfortable member of Russia's rising middle-class — an IT entrepreneur with a taste for upmarket restaurants, Thai massages and foreign travel. [...] police raided his vacation rental in Barcelona, marching him out in handcuffs to face charges of being one of the world's most notorious spam lords. The imprisoned Russians may be falsely tying their arrests to Trump's election in a bid to sow confusion and politicize their cases. Evgeny Nikulin, 29, was arrested in a restaurant in Prague in October, accused of hacking into LinkedIn and Dropbox around the time that tens of millions of users there were compromised; Stanislav Lisov, 31, the alleged developer of the NeverQuest financial data-stealing software, was detained at Barcelona's airport during his honeymoon in January; and Yury Martyshev, 35, accused of helping run a service that let cybercriminals test-drive their malicious software, was recently extradited to the U.S. after being pulled off a train at the Russia-Latvia border in April. On Tuesday, Alexander Vinnik, 38, was arrested at his hotel in Greece on charges of running a money laundering ring for hackers that processed billions of dollars in digital currency. The 36-year-old is charged with fraud and unauthorized interception of electronic communications, but his spamming career is said to stretch back to the turn of the millennium, when the business of stuffing email inboxes full of pitches for cut-price pills and penny stocks was still largely unregulated. Ralsky said Levashov was pulling in "more money than you could shake a stick at" and traveled widely, saying he remembered getting vacation snaps of the Russian enjoying himself at a fishing cabin in Finland or the famously expensive Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai. In 2007, he was indicted under his Severa alias as part of the case where Ralsky and several associates pleaded guilty to charges including wire fraud and mail fraud. In online forums, he promoted the idea of collaborating with Russia's spy services, according to Soldatov, the Russian intelligence expert, who said Levashov spearheaded an effort to knock out websites linked to Islamist insurgencies in southern Russia. Nikulin was in fact questioned in the presence of an FBI agent from the bureau's San Francisco office, according to a Russian-language legal document which Makeev shared with AP. [...] there's no indication the agent — who was one of 10 officials, translators and defense lawyers listed as being present at the interrogation — ever discussed the election or made Nikulin an offer, much less of citizenship.
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