A Latvian ransomware affiliate was sentenced to greater than eight years in jail for conducting assaults on behalf of a number of prison manufacturers together with Conti and Akira.
Deniss Zolotarjovs pleaded responsible in July 2025 to cash laundering and wire fraud expenses after being arrested within the nation of Georgia. He was extradited to the U.S. in August 2024 on accusations that he was a key ransomware operator who specialised in escalating stress techniques throughout ransom negotiations with victims.
Zolotarjovs was particularly tasked with analyzing knowledge stolen from victims, researching the businesses and utilizing the knowledge to drive victims into paying. He was usually introduced in to shut negotiations and was paid 10% of the ransom.
In a single incident, prosecutors stated Zolotarjovs grew to become enraged when a pediatric healthcare firm refused to pay a ransom. He urged different members of his group to leak or promote copies of youngsters’s well being info, finally escalating additional to sending samples of the stolen pediatric knowledge to a whole bunch of sufferers as a risk.
Zolotarjovs, who’s a 35-year-old Latvian citizen however was born in Moscow, labored for a cybercriminal group that was run by a former chief of the prolific however now-defunct Conti ransomware gang.
Prosecutors recognized the group as Karakurt — a ransomware and knowledge extortion operation that has pale from view lately however launched dozens of high-profile assaults courting again to 2020.
Investigators stated the group used dozens of various names when extorting victims, together with Conti, Karakurt, Royal, TommyLeaks, SchoolBoys and Akira. The FBI gained entry to a chat server the place they noticed how the group’s members coordinated assaults, extorted victims and profited from the incidents.
The DOJ stated the group operated out of an workplace constructing in St. Petersburg and included a number of former Russian legislation enforcement officers. This has given the operation entry to new recruits and different perks like exemption from obligatory army service or taxes.
Throughout Zolotarjovs’s participation within the group — from about June 2021 to March 2023 — the group stole from and extorted over 53 firms. Prosecutors stated he helped trigger $56 million in losses, together with almost $3 million in ransom funds. They famous that that is probably a extreme undercount of the monetary affect attributable to Zolotarjovs’s ransomware assaults.
“The defendant performed a key function within the conspiracy. Having lived and attended faculty in Western Europe, he was an asset to the group. His English abilities and hardball techniques made him notably efficient in reviving negotiations,” prosecutors stated.
“His success was famous by different members of the conspiracy, and he was requested to coach and information a coconspirator that has since gone on to change into the lead negotiator for the group. His participation within the conspiracy was sustained over 1000’s of messages despatched over a multi-year interval.”
Prosecutors warned that the group Zolotarjovs was a part of “stays lively and prolific.” Incident responders from Google stated Akira, one of many ransomware model names utilized by the gang, was the second most continuously noticed malware household in 2025 and researchers have tied greater than 100 assaults this 12 months to the operation.
His former ransomware associates “have solely grown extra harmful, changing into probably the most, if not essentially the most, most lively ransomware teams at present,” prosecutors stated. Zolotarjovs is the one member of his group to face a U.S. courtroom.
The DOJ argued for a lengthier sentence, telling the courtroom that after his sentence is full, Zolotarjovs will probably return to Russia and proceed his ransomware work.
“Depriving them of the defendant’s providers as a trusted, skilled, and expert negotiator is a useful profit to the general public,” prosecutors stated. “A major interval of incarceration permits know-how to evolve previous Zolotarjovs’s experience and the prison community he relied on to degrade.”
The Justice Division argued for a sentence of 126 months however the choose gave him 102 months in jail.
“With this sentence, a merciless, ruthless, and harmful worldwide cybercriminal is now behind bars,” stated Assistant Lawyer Common A. Tysen Duva.
“Deniss Zolotarjovs helped his ransomware gang revenue from hacks of dozens of firms, and even on a authorities entity whose 911 system was compelled offline. He additionally used stolen youngsters’s well being info to extend his leverage to extort sufferer funds.
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