Reason for Mavrodi's arrest is information obtained by Ukrainian hackers, Internet party says

Kyiv, March 15 (Interfax-Ukraine) – Leader of the Ukrainian Internet party Dmytro Holubov said that the founder of the notorious MMM pyramid scheme, Sergei Mavrodi, was arrested on the basis of information obtained by the Ukrainian computer hackers.

"Ukrainian hackers managed to get the passports of Mavrodi, which he wanted to use to move to another country, and also lists of depositors, and totals that were deposited by the members of the pyramid scheme. Soon all these findings could be on the Internet," Holubov said at the press conference at the Interfax agency on Thursday.

According to him, Mavrodi planned to leave the territory of Russia on March 15-16 with another passport under another name. In particular, the Ukrainian hackers managed to get a copy of Mavrodi's Lithuanian passport, with which he probably tried to leave the country. The plans were revealed by correspondence Mavrodi had with embassies of other countries.

"I handled this correspondence and the copies of the original of his Lithuanian passport to the Russian Federal Security Service," Holubov said. He said such actions should prevent Mavrodi from being able to leave Russia.

The Internet party is also going to announce its findings about new depositors in Mavrodi's pyramid scheme, he said.

Holubov said that in Kazakhstan there are about 250 depositors, in the Ukrainian city of Odesa about 3,000, and in Moscow from 12,000 to 15,000 depositors.

"I'll soon gradually post the lists of depositors on the Internet, since in 1994 simple Soviet people became the victims of the pyramid, people who used to trust the television, but in 2011 80% of the depositors in MMM are just greedy people, who decided to do nothing, live at the expense of other people, and parasitize," he said.

The leader of the Internet party predicts that now the depositors would like to return their money, otherwise they will be 'pocketed'," he said.

As reported, on March 14, Sergei Mavrodi, the founder of Russia's notorious MMM pyramid scheme, was put under five days' arrest as punishment for the non-payment of a 1,000-ruble fine.

In January 2011, Mavrodi said he had set up a financial project called MMM-2011, with the MMM acronym standing for "My Mozhem Mnogoye [We Are Capable of a Great Deal]."

At a joint meeting on January 21, the expert council for financial market competition of the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS) and the Federal Financial Markets Service declared MMM-2011 to be another pyramid scheme. The FAS passed over the assessment and findings of research underlying it to the police.