Hi, I'm Ryan Levy.

Welcome to Cyber reasons's malicious life. Criminals and in particular cyber criminals aren't good people.

They cheat, they steal, they can, but in most cases they do have their personal boundaries.

Someone might be willing to steal millions of dollars

from a bank, but not Rob an elderly lady. Ross Albrick, whose story we covered in the previous

two episodes of our podcast, was okay with paying a hitman to kill someone, but never murdered anyone himself.

But every once in a while you encounter a criminal who's different, someone who seems not to have any bounding limits at all, a ruthless man for whom the goal truly justifies the means.

Leo Kovayev is that kind of a person, and it's very probable that it is this no-limits

mentality that made him so successful as a cyber criminal.

But sometimes, when you have no internal boundaries to balance your raw desire for self-gain, even a genius criminal can go just

one step too far. Life in the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain was harsh, especially under the rule of

Leonid Bergenyev who revoked all the economic reforms of his predecessor in office and brought

the Soviet economy to a standstill.

Under Brezhnev, the Communist Party dominated every aspect of the Soviet Union's citizens lives.

But while party leaders enjoyed the benefits of power,

most citizens, especially those who lived outside of big cities,

lived in pretty miserable conditions.

Leonid Leo Alexandrovich Kovayev was born in 1972 in Moscow into this grim economic reality.

As a child he excelled at chess which became his main hobby.

His school teachers praised his extraordinary logical thinking and predicted a

bright future for him. But his family's poor financial situation and the pressing need to help

his parents and take care of his four sisters prevented him from developing his skills in any way.

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