French law enforcement authorities arrested a Russian professional basketball player at the request of the United States, where he is wanted for allegedly taking part in a ransomware hacking ring, a Paris court heard Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Daniil Kasatkin, 26, who played college basketball at Penn State University and most recently for Moscow’s MBA-MAI, was arrested at Paris\u2019 Charles de Gaulle Airport on June 21, officials said.<\/p>\n
Authorities in the United States accuse him of negotiating payoffs for a group that hacked the computer systems of around 900 companies and two federal government entities in the U.S. between 2020 and 2022, demanding money to end their attacks.<\/p>\n
Kasatkin, 26, denies the accusations.<\/p>\n
“He bought a used computer. He did absolutely nothing wrong. He’s shocked,” his lawyer, Frederic Belot, told AFP.<\/p>\n
“He’s useless with computers. He can’t even install an app. He didn’t touch anything on this computer. It was either hacked, or sold to him by a hacker who wanted to pass himself off as someone else,” Belot added.<\/p>\n
The court denied bail for Kasatkin, who faces potential extradition to the United States.<\/p>\n
Belot said Kasatkin had recently become engaged and traveled to France with his fianc\u00e9e. He added that the athlete’s physical condition was deteriorating in custody, threatening his basketball career.<\/p>\n
Kasatkin played four seasons with MBA-MAI, helping the team place third twice in the Russian Basketball Cup. He appeared briefly as a guard for Penn State during the 2018\u20132019 season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"French law enforcement authorities arrested a Russian professional basketball player at the request of the United States, where…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":160295,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3724],"tags":[7,2332,30243,417],"class_list":{"0":"post-160294","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-basketball","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-france","10":"tag-hackers","11":"tag-united-states"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/114827931687871325","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}