Under the guise of a client willing to buy some credit card information, US Secret Service agents managed to urge the hacker to sell him the required data. This constituted the grounds for the cyber-criminal’s arrest.

American authorities consider Khorokhorin to be among the founders of an international cyber-criminal network called CarderPlanet – “one of the most sophisticated organizations of online financial criminals in the world”, according to the US Secret Service Assistant Director for Investigations, Michael Merritt. The officer claims the network has been “repeatedly linked to nearly every major intrusion of financial information reported to the international law enforcement community.”

The criminal network employed about 7,000 people, based mostly in Eastern Europe and CIS countries. The members of the organization specialized on stealing clients’ data from Western banks and other organizations related to credit card numbers. American secret services shut down the network in 2004. Since that time they have been tracking criminals at large.

“Nowadays, the annual financial damage caused by cyber criminals around the world runs into hundreds of billion of dollars. This business employs thousands of people in many countries. As the world becomes linked closer by computers and Internet, the number of such criminals increases,” an investment trust analyst, Tatyana Menkova, informed Russian website “Gazeta.ru”.

The Russian analyst doesn’t seem to be as concerned about cyber criminals as American authorities are. In Tatyana Menkova’s opinion, most so-called carders are inexperienced amateurs and cannot seriously endanger banks. Basically, cardholders themselves and their banks’ computer security departments are responsible for the protection of their funds, the analyst concludes.

Nikita Kislitsyn, the editor-in-chief of Russia's Hacker magazine, has told RT the arrest is unlikely to change much, as there are many more cyber criminals still at large.

Ed Rowley, a Senior Product Manager from the online protection firm M86 security, thinks that the global nature of cyber crime makes it difficult to tackle it on a national level.

“Cyber crime is very, very widespread globally – this one of the big problems. Recently we’ve seen an attack against UK banking customers, now the command-and-control servers for this attack were based in Eastern Europe. However, those servers – we don’t know where they get their control from. You can have one hosted server in one country being operated remotely from another – what’s performing an attack on the UK. This makes it even more difficult for the police to track down the criminals themselves,” he told RT.