ST. PETERSBURG. Nov 2 (Interfax) - Sergei Pavlovich, a Belarusian citizen convicted of stealing credit card numbers (carding) and detained in St. Petersburg at the request of the U.S., has said he has been released from a police station.
"I am back at the hotel, no longer in a detention cell, where I was just yesterday," Pavlovich said in a live broadcast on his YouTube channel on Tuesday.
He said the police detained him in a hotel in St. Petersburg on Monday, took him to a police station where he spoke with a prosecutor, and set him free.
"They can't transfer me to America because there is no extradition agreement between Russia and the United States. [...] I have fully served my sentence for this crime: I have spent ten years in jail in Belarus. Yet America still wants to see me incarcerated. [...] America does not recognize sentences served outside its territory," Pavlovich said.
He said he had hired a lawyer in the United States to sort things out with the U.S. law enforcement authorities.
An informed source told Interfax that Pavlovich was detained in St. Petersburg on November 1. He said that the United States put Pavlovich on the international wanted list under Article 1029 (B)(2) of the U.S. Criminal Code (knowingly and with intent to defraud traffics in or uses one or more unauthorized access devices).
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1029
As follows from information available in open sources, Pavlovich has been repeatedly involved in criminal cases dealing with cybercrime. In particular, one of these sources indicates that Pavlovich was implicated in "the largest and most complex identity theft in U.S. history" and was charged with selling data of stolen credit cards in 2008.
Belarus sentenced Pavlovich to ten years in prison for carding in 2009. He was released from prison in 2015.
Pavlovich has lately been known for owning a YouTube channel with more than 500,000 subscribers.