The founder of the international cybercrime company Group-IB, Ilya Sachkov, who is in a pre-trial detention center on a case of treason, said that Oleg Kashentsov, the current head of the FSB Information Security Center, was involved in his persecution. A publication about this appeared on the entrepreneur’s Telegram channel.
Sachkov also added that even before his arrest, he assumed that “a serious provocation was being prepared” against him, and recorded a video message in case something happened to him will happen. “If you see this video, then something has happened or is happening to me. A hospital, a prison, a disappearance — something that is extraordinary, but to which we are probably already accustomed, ”the appeal begins with these words.
According to Sachkov, his criminal case is based on the testimony of Sergei Mikhailov, Kashentsov's predecessor as head of the FSB Information Security Center. Mikhailov himself was sentenced in 2019 to 22 years in prison in a case of treason. According to investigators, in 2011 he handed over to the FBI the data of the operational-search activity in the case of Pavel Vrublevsky, CEO of the processing company Chronopay. The latter is considered by the US authorities to be involved in cyber attacks.
“I note that the current head of the FSB Information Security Center, Oleg Innokentevich Kashentsov, worked in a fairly transparent connection with the ex-head of the department and an American spy, Sergei Mikhailov, under whose slander I ended up in a pre-trial detention center. This raises the question of the competence of the current leadership of the CIB, who is looking for enemies where there are none. But even more broadly, the work of such «experts» puts the country's security on the brink of an abyss in this difficult period for it,” Sachkov says in the video.
Sachkov was arrested at the end of September 2021 in a case of high treason (Article 275 of the Criminal Code). According to Bloomberg, in the weeks before his arrest, «he was warned not to leave the country.» According to the publication, one of the alleged reasons for accusing Sachkov of treason was that he gave the US government information about the Fancy Bear hacker group, which is associated with the GRU. The investigation believes that Sachkov collaborated with Mikhailov for several years.
On June 15, the VChK-OGPU telegram channel published the text of a statement that, according to the authors of the channel, Sachkov sent to the head of the Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin. In a statement, the founder of Group-IB said that he considers his criminal prosecution and accusation of collaboration with Mikhailov to be absurd, since he was one of those who drew the attention of the security forces to the crimes of the former head of the FSB CIB. According to Sachkov, Mikhailov decided to “take revenge on him” in order to avenge the criminal case, and Kashentsov, who had also threatened the entrepreneur earlier, took advantage of this.