A very clever scheme: how a Ukrainian stole millions from Microsoft, but they did not notice there for a whole year

Ukrainian Vladimir Kvashuk stole Xbox gift cards, sold them several times cheaper and took money for himself. How he did it, the publication said. MC.today.

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Kvashuk worked for Microsoft and stole gift card codes. He managed to steal millions, which he spent on several new homes and a brand new Tesla.

Xbox Gift Card is a 25-character code that you can use to buy games in the branded store. So gift cards can be thought of as a kind of digital currency.

Company member

The Ukrainian got a job in the company in 2017. He was hired to test e-commerce infrastructure. His team mimicked purchases at Microsoft's online store and looked for payment failures.

For example, if he ordered a laptop, but paid with a Microsoft work card, then the system would complete the order, but would not send the goods for unloading, since this is a test order. Thus, Kvashuk had to document all the errors he encountered while placing test orders.

The mistake that changed lives

One day, Kvashuk noticed that when he was testing the purchase of gift cards, the system was giving him real codes. He realized that he could generate an unlimited number of codes, for which he did not need to pay anything, but which he could sell.

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The Ukrainian started selling cards from $ 10 to $ 100, and in two years he managed to steal 152 thousand Xbox gift cards worth $ 10,1 million. To prevent the company from exposing him, the programmer stole the logins and passwords of his colleagues and “bought” cards through VPN.

Later, he decided that it was time to speed up the work, and in January 2018 he created the PurchaseFlow.CS program. With a few clicks, he could select the value of the gift card (30, 75, 100), the withdrawal of the currency (US dollars, euros, British pounds) and the number of purchases.

He sold all gift cards at a 55% discount.

Surge of purchases

In 2018, the company noticed a strange surge in purchases - twice as many as usual. We started an investigation and questioned the staff of the system testing team. It turned out that employees indicated their data in the reports, and anyone who received the report could log into their account and steal cards due to an error.

How he was exposed

The FBI and Microsoft's internal investigation team found that although Kvashuk was hiding his IP address, all purchases were made from a single Linux laptop with an old Firefox browser. This gave the pretext to conduct a search in his house.

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When the feds got into the Ukrainian's house, they found rough records of the purchases of gift cards, and the data of the crypto wallet where he was withdrawing the money. The agents also found a note in which Kvashuk described where he would spend his millions.

Prison term

He was arrested in 2019, and never admitted his guilt. Vladimir Kvashuk will be in prison until 2027, and will also pay a fine of $ 8,3 million.

“He generated gift card codes to help the company. The more free Xbox games Kvashuk distributed, the more popular the platform became, and the overall costs increased, ”said Kvashuk's lawyer.

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