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Who got arrested in the raid on the XSS crime forum?
On July 22, 2025, the European police agency Europol said a long-running investigation led by the French Police resulted in the arrest of a 38-year-old administrator of XSS, a Russian-language cybercrime forum with more than 50,000 members. The action has triggered…
The action has triggered an ongoing frenzy of speculation and panic among XSS denizens about the identity of the unnamed suspect, but the consensus is that he is a pivotal figure in the crime forum scene who goes by the hacker handle “ Toha.” Here’s a deep dive on what’s knowable about Toha, and a short stab at who got nabbed. The reason I know this historic tidbit is that in 2013, Vovnenko — using the hacker nicknames “ Fly,” and “ Flycracker ” — hatched a plan to have a gram of heroin purchased off of the Silk Road darknet market and shipped to our home in Northern Virginia. Vovnenko was later arrested for unrelated cybercrime activities, extradited to the United States, convicted, and deported after a 16-month stay in the U.S. prison system [on several occasions, he has expressed heartfelt apologies for the incident, and we have since buried the hatchet].
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