A high-profile criminal case involving a Ukrainian techie and $10 million he stole from tech giant Microsoft is over. A federal district court in Seattle sentenced Volodymyr Kvashuk to nine years in prison, finding him guilty of 18 federal felonies, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Western District of Washington reported on Nov. 9.
Kvashuk, 26, will also have to pay $8.3 million in restitution and can be deported from the U.S. after the sentence.
Born in the western Ukrainian city of Ostroh, Kvashuk worked for two years at the Microsoft head office in Redmond, Washington — from August 2016 to June 2018. He was fired after an internal investigation revealed the shocking details of his grand fraudulent scheme.
Kvashuk was responsible for testing the company’s online retail platform and, at one point, started to use his access to the technology for his benefit. The Ukrainian created fake testing accounts and, through them, obtained Microsoft gift cards. Later, he would sell them online for bitcoins to cover the source of his income, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The sales scheme generated multimillion profits for Kvashuk and bought him a luxurious lifestyle He purchased a $1.6 million lakefront home and a $160,000 Tesla vehicle. His official salary at the time was $116,000 a year.
Kvashuk was arrested on July 16, 2019, after which the case was investigated jointly by detectives from the Western Cyber Crimes Unit and the U.S. Secret Service.
Seven months later, he was found guilty on wire fraud, money laundering, identity theft as well the filing of false tax returns. Judge James L. Robart said that Kvashuk “didn’t have any respect for the law.”
During the five-day jury trial in February, Kvashuk denied the accusations and said that he was working on a “special project to benefit the company.”
The investigation also revealed that the techie used test email accounts of other Microsoft team members.
“Stealing from your employer is bad enough, but stealing and making it appear that your colleagues are to blame widens the damage beyond dollars and cents,” said U.S. Attorney Brian Moran.
Kvashuk falsified his tax forms by declaring that the bitcoins were a gift from his father and so his case has become the “nation’s first bitcoin case that has a tax component to it,” according to Ryan Korner, detective at U.S. Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigation division.
“Criminals who think they can avoid detection by using cryptocurrency and laundering through (bitcoin schemes) are put on notice — you will be caught and you will be held accountable,” Korner said.
