Yuri Vyhodetz, head of the division, told Newsweek what separates the Cyber Police from the country’s more traditional law enforcement agencies.
“We get the kind of information that depends on skills and experience that is not native to most police departments,” Vyhodetz said. “This can involve searching for identifying markers such as old phone numbers, email addresses, and social media accounts, but we also have colleagues with higher level skills relevant to our work. However, we do not go into detail about such capabilities.”
The capabilities that Vyhodetz alluded to were formed in part thanks to Ukraine’s close official ties with Western countries, including the United States.
“The cooperative relationship goes back a long way,” he said. “FBI representatives come here to Kyiv, and also vice versa. It’s become difficult for our colleagues to leave the country due to the fact that many of them are males of military age, but before the war, our guys would frequently attend conferences in Spain, Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere.”
The war has not only changed the travel options for Cyber Police officers, but also the types of cases they are investigating. The department has always been involved in tracking down online con artists and thwarting hackers, but now many of those same cyber criminals have begun using the ongoing conflict as a vehicle for making money.
“People put up advertisements on the internet that they were selling body armor and helmets,” Vyhodetz said. “Very often, it is Ukrainian volunteer groups who pool money in order to buy such things for troops.”
“So imagine that there are frontline soldiers who need equipment, and regular Ukrainians have donated to purchase these things, and someone steals that money, leaving everyone waiting for equipment that could save their fellow countrymen’s lives,” he added. “When we catch such people, they very often make a public apology to the soldiers.”
In another case stemming from events in May, a defendant promised to evacuate an older couple from the besieged city of Mariupol. The couple’s daughter arranged the transfer with a person who presented himself as a driver capable of exfiltrating her parents. However, after receiving an electronic prepayment of 10,000 UAH (Ukrainian Hryvnia currency, the equivalent of $270 U.S.), the purported driver made a series of excuses explaining why the trip would have to be delayed.
While waiting to be rescued, the couple was killed.
“It’s difficult to find a cultured way of describing such people,” Vyhodetz said. “Is this man a con artist, or is he a murderer?”
Another common type of criminal scheme involves the promise of temporary shelter for internally displaced Ukrainians. In the early days of the war in particular, as millions of residents fled hotspots in the country’s East for calmer areas around the Carpathian Mountains in the West, advertisements for non-existent housing options began popping up on the internet.
“The schemers would post fake ads online of houses for rent, collect advanced payment, and then direct people to an address for a cemetery,” Vyhodetz said. “Imagine three families with four small children fleeing Kharkiv and driving hundreds of kilometers only to arrive in the middle of the night at a cemetery.”
“When we caught that group, it turned out that they had already managed to deceive 55 people, who had paid them a total of 350,000 UAH ($9,500 U.S.),” he added.
In addition to fighting against domestic criminals intent on making money off of their fellow citizens’ suffering, the Ukrainian Cyber Police have also been involved in collecting information on war crimes committed by Russian soldiers on the territory of Ukraine.
“Software has been developed that makes it possible to successfully identify the faces of Russian military personnel who have committed war crimes on the territory of Ukraine,” Vyhodets said.
“In cooperation with our Western partners, we are collecting evidence and preparing it for transfer to the court in The Hague,” he added.
The Cyber Police have also contributed to Ukraine’s defenses against the attempts of Russian hackers to destabilize the situation in the country.
“It’s not a secret to anyone that in the weeks before the full-scale Russian invasion began in February, there were massive cyber attacks against the organs of Ukrainian state authority,” Vyhodetz said. “We, along with other Ukrainian agencies, worked to patch any holes and prevent that from happening.”
“The quantity of Russian cyberattacks against Ukraine this year is much higher than usual,” he added. “Since the start of the full-scale invasion, all of the relevant Ukrainian departments, including ours, have been working even more closely with our American partners in order to thwart these attacks.”
While such cooperation has certainly aided Ukrainians in their efforts to defend themselves against Russian aggression, it also comes with benefits for Western countries providing the assistance.
“We’ve learned a lot over the course of this war,” Vyhodetz said. “It is one thing to fight against criminals, and another to defend one’s country against the cyber attacks of an aggressor.”
“We now have real wartime experience fighting against Russian cyber operations,” he added, “and that knowledge is valuable to our Western partners, who are also concerned about the threat of foreign aggression in all its forms.”
