It had been an unprecedented effort to work together and knock down the rapidly metastasizing cybercrime underworld. Craig stayed awake for the entire trip, staring out the window into the darkness as the country passed by.įor more than a year, Craig had traveled all over Ukraine to build a relationship between the American, Ukrainian, and Russian governments. He passed the time moving between his cabin and the drinks car, a baroque affair with velvet curtains.

As evidence came in from around the world, the Bureau and its international partners slowly put names and faces to the gang and started plotting the next step.Īs the train made its way across Ukraine, Jim Craig, who was leading his very first case with the FBI, couldn’t sleep.

Soon Operation Trident Breach, as they called it, homed in on a highly advanced organized-crime operation that was based in Eastern Europe but had global reach. Even today, there are few to match its scale.īit by bit, the American investigators began to sketch a picture of the culprits. At that point, with at least $79 million stolen, it was by far the biggest cybercrime case the FBI had ever seen. That’s where the agents had started trying to understand a cybercrime explosion that was targeting Americans and pulling in millions of dollars from victims. The overnight trek was set to take 12 hours, but it had truly begun two years earlier, in 2008, at the FBI offices in Omaha, Nebraska. The train moved haltingly, past empty country and villages that, to the Americans at least, looked as if they’d been frozen in the Cold War. They could afford spacious private rooms while locals were sleeping 10 to a cabin. But the five FBI agents felt like luxury tourists compared to most travelers onboard. The American cops took the slower, cheaper train from Kyiv to Donetsk.Īfter repeatedly traveling between Ukraine and the United States, there were more comfortable ways to make this final, 400-mile journey.

Russian hacking sites