Pavel Vrublevsky, the founder and main owner of electronic payment company ChronoPay, was arrested last Thursday, being suspected of having organized a cyber attack on the website of Assist, a competitor ChronoPay, in an attempt to block payment transactions with the Aeroflot website.
Prosecutors allege Vrublevsky sought to discredit Assist because Vrublevsky hoped to ink a contract to process credit card payments for Aeroflot’s air tickets. In an interview with the Russian edition of Forbes magazine last year, Vrublevsky estimated the online sales of the country’s major carrier’s tickets at $30 million a month, a significant part of the whole volume of payments made with credit or debit cards on the Russian Internet.
Soon after the hacker attack last year, Assist and its partner VTB24 lost their mandates to serve Aeroflot’s online payments in favor of a third player, Alfa-Bank.
The attack hindered the processing of online payments for the carrier’s air tickets, resulting in alleged losses of more than 1 million rubles, or over $30,000, according to law enforcement agencies. Aeroflot itself estimated its losses to be much higher – 194 million rubles, or $6.9 million – in the lawsuit the company filed.
Vrublevsky was arrested at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow upon his arrival from the Maldives, where he spent his vacation with his wife and children.
