A man from Kosovo pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court in Pittsburgh to running an illicit website dedicated to selling stolen personal information online.
Ardit Kutleshi will be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Mark Hornak on Feb. 9.
Kutleshi pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering and aggravated identity theft as part of his role running the Rydox website.
His brother, Jetmir Kutleshi, who was also charged in the scheme, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to time served in December.
According to federal prosecutors, the Rydox marketplace was used to conduct more than 7,600 sales of personally identifiable information, stolen access devices and other cybercrime tools.
Among the items sold, the government said, were Social Security numbers, stolen credit card information, scam pages and spamming tutorials.
The marketplace had more than 18,000 users and offered more than 321,372 cybercrime products, the government said.
According to the indictment, Rydox operated for more than eight years. According to court documents, it generated about $608,000 in illicit proceeds.
Both Ardit and Jetmir Kuleshi were arrested in December 2024 in Kosovo and extradited to the United States.
A third person who helped administer the marketplace, Shpend Sokoli, also a Kosovo national, was arrested in Albania and was to be prosecuted there, the Department of Justice said.
As part of the investigation, the U.S. government seized the domain www.Rydox.cc, preventing the owners and third parties from using it.
In addition, the servers used to run Rydox in Malaysia were also seized, as was approximately $225,000 worth of cryptocurrency in accounts controlled by the defendants.
“There is no telling how much financial damage the Rydox marketplace caused and how much harm Rydox’s victims incurred…” the government wrote.
According to the indictment, people living in the Western District of Pennsylvania were identified as being victims whose personal information was stolen and then sold on the Rydox marketplace.
That included a person whose name, date of birth and email were sold, as well as three people who had their debit card numbers sold on the site and another whose Social Security number was sold.
In addition, the indictment said an undercover FBI source working in the Western District of Pennsylvania made online purchases of stolen information from Rydox.
Jetmir Kutleshi, pleaded guilty to conspiracy in December and was sentenced to time served, as well as one year of supervised released.
The court’s sentencing order asked that Jetmir Kutleshi be held in the custody of the U.S. marshals to be immediately returned to Kosovo, as was requested in his sentencing memorandum.
According to Jetmir Kulteshi’s defense attorney, he was a a minor participant in the conspiracy with about $60,000 worth of transactions attributable to him.
His attorney said the only transactions his client engaged in were at the request of his brother when Ardit Kutleshi did not have access to a computer.