Legal News

?Crazy? Fired IT Guy Fails in Extortion Plan, Is Now In Jail

By Amir Efrati

To all those disgruntled former employees being laid off on Wall Street these days and thinking of revenge, just remember: your former employers have powerful lawyers, and those lawyers have powerful friends . . . in the government.

Take the case of Viktor Savtyrev. Yesterday morning the 29-year-old systems administrator was arrested for allegedly trying to extort New York-based Third Avenue Management, a mutual fund company that manages more than $15 billion in assets. TAM had laid off 14 employees last week, including Savtyrev, a Russian native.

According to this complaint filed by prosecutors in the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office in Newark, Savtyrev didn’t take the news well. He allegedly emailed the firm’s general counsel and several others and threatened to damage the company’s servers if it didn’t beef up his severance package and give him “[e]xcellent” job references. Referring to himself as a “Crazy Russian,” he said he would expose the breach to financial publications. Here’s the story from the Star-Ledger.

The firm contacted its outside counsel, which then contacted the U.S. attorney’s office. Prosecutors contacted the F.B.I., which recorded subsequent phone calls between the company and Savtyrev, who further threatened to have his “comrades from Belarus” hack into the firm’s systems. (The Star-Ledger helpfully notes that Belarus, a former member of the Soviet Union, is among a handful of Eastern European nations from which cyber criminals have launched attacks against American companies in recent years.)

Bob Stahl, the lawyer representing Savtyrev, who is still being detained, told the Law Blog that his client said “unwise things . . . out of frustration” and that he had “no intention of pulling off” the threat. A spokeswoman for Third Avenue Management called the matter “a regrettable situation.” We’d like to give props to TAM’s outside counsel, but the company declined to identify its lawyer. Representing the government: AUSAs Seth Kosto and Erez Liebermann.

Photo: iStockPhoto

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on November 11, 2008 (boomark / email).