

In March 2018, Kvashuk did most of his business on under the name Grizzled Wold.

“Kvashuk was flipping so many 5x5 codes that prosecutors said he was singularly responsible for global fluctuations in the price of Xbox gift cards on reseller markets.” /NXD5hqFf20- Isaac JThe Trades and The Good Life With a few clicks, gift card denominations, currency output, and the desired number of purchases were selected, and then it was off to embezzle from the company. In January of 2018, to automate and speed up his fraud scheme process, he built a computer program called PurchaseFlow.CS. When working from his apartment, he would mask his internet traffic by routing it through servers in Japan and Russia. To conceal his identity, he used his co-workers' mock profiles and used their test logins.
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When he confirmed that the 5x5 codes were legitimate, one of the first things he redeemed with those codes was a $164.99 download of Microsoft Office. Instead of reporting the glitch, Kvashuk placed test orders for dozens of gift card codes amounting to $2,000 and then $4,200, then, later on, worth a lot more. And anyone can trade these 5x5 codes for cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and then turn that Bitcoin into cash. So if you bought $20 in Xbox gift cards, you can spend $20 on Microsoft's store. These codes are a string of 25 letters and numbers e-mailed to the buyer and had the same purpose as those numbers and letters found on other gift cards like Apple or Applebee's. However, these didn't hold for Xbox gift cards. The purchases were acknowledged as fake, so devices like PCs, tablets, and keyboards weren't shipped once a transaction went through. His team ran simulated purchases on Microsoft's online store to look for glitches in the payment system. Sometime in 2017, Microsoft recruited him for a full-time engineering position with a $116,000 annual salary. SearchDom.AI was pitched as "our automated solution for all your marketing problems."įormer Microsoft Employee Pleads Guilty for Stealing More Than $10 Million Worth Company Digital Asset: Recently, a former employee of the tech giant Microsoft, Volodymyr Kvashuk, who worked at Microsoft from August 2016 to June 2018, was convicted in… /HVmUuKEa2X- Shah Sheikh MaAccording to Bloomberg, it was unclear when exactly Kvashuk stumbled upon the gift card glitch in Microsft's security system, which is now closed for obvious reasons. He was also able to set up a company with a fellow Washington-based entrepreneur named Lee Wang.
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That following summer, in August 2016, Kvashuk secured a job as a software engineer at a company contracted with Microsoft to develop its online store. He also met and started dating a fellow Ukrainian expatriate, Diana Leonhard. His aunt and uncle put him up, he sought asylum, and he got a software gig reviewing JavaScript code. He had joined protests in Kyiv in 2014 that culminated in the ousting of Ukraine's Russian-backed president. after his aunt Alla's wedding was to seek asylum. One reason Kvashuk's parents wanted him to stay in the U.S. In Ukraine, Kvashuk studied computer science and economics at a top university where his mother and father taught. He was attending the wedding of his aunt Alla who was marrying a dentist from Southern California. Volodymyr Kvashuk, originally from Rivne Oblast in Ukraine, first arrived in the U.S. A judge sentenced the swindler to nine years in prison, as reported by Bloomberg in depth. Afterwards, she worked as postdoctoral researcher at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg (Germany) and as associate lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast (Australia), before becoming a research group leader at the University of Würzburg in 2013 and a professor at TUM in 2019.A two-year fraud scheme orchestrated by a Microsoft employee resulted in $10.1 million worth of Xbox gift cards stolen from the tech giant. In 2010, she obtained her doctorate from the department of Animal Ecology and Tropical Biology at Würzburg University. Sara Leonhardt studied biology at the University of Würzburg (Germany) and at the Duke University (NC, USA). behavioral conditioning) and modern analytical chemistry (GCMS, HPLC). Research in her group combines ecological methods (field studies, biostatistics) with classic behavioral and physiological studies (e.g. Projects investigate bee-plant interactions as well as bee health and performance in different habitats and along biodiversity gradients. The research of Sara Leonhardt addresses the ecology and chemistry of plant-insect interactions in both temperate and tropical regions, with particular focus on bees.
