An unlikely couple, a doomed affair and their €64mn ransomware scam

Financial Times ^ | 10/19/2025 | Courtney Weaver and Laura Dubois

[E. Pluribus Unum]

How a mysterious tip-off led investigators to uncover the inner workings of a highly unusual hacking operation

By the time the police arrived, Elena Timofeeva was ready. The petite brunette with a heart-shaped face and deep-set eyes had spent the past eight years living a double life. In Marbella, she appeared to be an inconspicuous 43-year-old Russian transplant who had swapped her life as the owner of a small electronics business back home in Siberia for sun-touched Spanish shores. But online, she had a different persona: Drakosha (“Little Dragon”) was a top lieutenant in one of the world’s biggest ransomware schemes. For years, she had been working as part of a team extorting money from individuals and businesses, encrypting victims’ personal and business data and demanding a fee to release it back to them.

In June 2023, the new life Timofeeva had built for herself was caving in. That morning, police had arrested her business partner, Vadim Sirotin. As soon as Sirotin’s sister alerted her, Timofeeva set to work deleting her private Telegram messages before authorities came for her too.

As the afternoon sun beat down, the police moved into the gated residential complex with its canary-yellow walls and private pool. They arrested Timofeeva on the street outside the apartment building. Inside, they seized various bank cards registered to different pseudonyms, four phones and assorted notebooks. On the balcony, Timofeeva had left three laptops neatly laid out on a table, two of them still running.

Timofeeva was an unlikely candidate to become a criminal mastermind of the dark web. She had spent the first 35 years of her life in the province of Kemerovo, one of Russia’s most important coal-mining regions. There are no records to show she’d ever left her home country, nor travelled much inside it. Her name was...

---

TOPICS:
KEYWORDS:

[AppyPappy]

We were engaged!!!

[spacejunkie2001]

can you copy and paste the remainder? Requires a subscription

[nwrep]

[nwrep]

[nwrep]

[nwrep]

[nwrep]

Sorry.

[catnipman]

https://archive.ph/1LR6J

[spacejunkie2001]

Very much appreciated!