Investigators looking into a vast international credit card theft ring extending from Ukraine and Belarus to China and victimizing nine of the largest U.S. retailers faced a central mystery: Who was orchestrating the crimes on the ground in the United States?
It turned out, investigators now say, that he was right under their noses. And it was a reference to a character in the popular U.S. comedy “Seinfeld” — the Soup Nazi — that helped break the case.
Albert Gonzalez, 27, a second-generation Cuban-American from Miami, was a seemingly reformed hacker turned U.S. Secret Service informant, helping agents identify his former cohorts in the shady online underworld where stolen credit and debit card numbers are bought and sold.
But using of variety of online handles, including “soupnazi,” Gonzalez remained a significant player in that underworld, investigators say.
U.S. government officials allege that Gonzalez played a central role in a loosely organized online crime syndicate that fraudulently obtained the credit and debit card numbers of tens of millions of American consumers.
“This case shows that there are no more boundaries,” said Craig Magaw, special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s criminal investigative division.
The Miami lawyer for Gonzalez, Rene Palomino Jr., disputes the charges. Palomino said the indictment represented “serious and substantial legal and factual challenges for the government to prove at trial.”
But the Secret Service agents who worked on the sprawling case present a different story: of a prolonged, multipart investigation that finally uncovered the critical links between Gonzalez’s various Web nicknames and his international co-conspirators.
The story begins five years ago in Miami, along the stretch of U.S. Route 1 called the South Dixie Highway. Starting in 2003, national retailers with outlets there, including The Sports Authority, OfficeMax and Barnes & Noble began falling victim to “war- drivers” — drive-by hackers who searched for holes…