Exotic cars, Russian agents, meth-spiked jailhouse coffee and working for Canada’s spy agency. The confessions of Ancaster ‘hacker for hire’ Karim Baratov

The young man sits in the sleepy Meadowlands Starbucks, having driven from his parents' Ancaster home a few minutes away in a sensible Ford.

He just turned 28 and is a student at Mohawk College, on the cusp of acquiring his insurance broker's licence.

About that: in his college text book his name appears in the chapter on cybercrime.

Life used to move faster for Karim Baratov, the millionaire hacker for hire" who bought his father a $70,000 Mercedes at 18, a house at 20, and was brandishing exotic cars and keeping $30,000 in a safe for walking around money, when the FBI hunted him down for conspiring with Russian spies.

To Baratov, his brazen behaviour bankrolled through hacking foreign email accounts was hiding in plain sight because a person who shows it all got nothing to hide."

That's a quote from Baratov's new book, titled Disconnected: A Memoir of the Yahoo Hacker."

Baratov was arrested at his Ancaster home in March 2017. After six months in Barton Street jail, he was extradited to the U.S. and sentenced in 2018 in San Francisco to five years in prison and fined $250,000 (U.S.) for his part in a computer fraud and identity theft operation. That scheme led to a security breach at Yahoo in which thousands of webmail accounts were compromised.

U.S. justice officials said the operation was orchestrated by two officers of the Russian Federal Security Service (formerly the KGB).

Baratov was released from prison in the summer of 2021.

The indictment filed in court said Baratov knowingly and with intent to defraud" helped hack email accounts including those belonging to Russian government officials, but Baratov said he did not realize he was allied with Russian agents, and initially didn't understand why he was arrested.

Baratov, who came to Canada at age 12 from Kazakhstan with his family knowing little English, self-published the book through Amazon, writing it entirely himself. It is available in softcover and Kindle.

He says he shared advance copies with about 50 of his friends; speaking with his Russian accent it sounds like feefty."

I could have hired a professional ghost writer, a lot of people do that, but then it loses something," he told The Spectator. I wanted the story to be mine."

The book includes his claim that he was recruited at 19 - strong-armed, the way he depicts it - in 2014 by CSIS agents to do covert work for Canada's intelligence agency employing his hacking prowess.

It happened one summer day, he writes, when he was home grabbing $10,000 cash from his safe, with plans to drive his Lamborghini to buy a laptop along with a friend who said he would get him a Best Buy employee discount. (Not that I needed it, but I appreciated the gesture.")

Two men came knocking at Baratov's door and told him they were from CSIS. He replied: What is that?"

CSIS is a Canadian version of CIA or MI6 if you prefer," the agent said, according to Baratov. We would like to speak to you about the way you make money ... Should we discuss it in the presence of your parents?"

Baratov writes: All blood left my face; I didn't know what to say but managed to stutter: Okay, let's go to a nearby Tim Hortons and talk. No one else needs to be involved.'"

According to the memoir, he was asked to do a variety of tasks for CSIS, meeting them up in bars, high-class restaurants, and even hotels," and that his reward came in the form of an implicit promise from an agent: If you have a problem with law enforcement, call. We will tell them that you are not the droid they are looking for."

After that," Baratov writes, I became more confident than ever. I felt bulletproof."

Such connections didn't shield him from the FBI, which was investigating Baratov for his hacking work for Russian agents that had started around 2014 - and which led to his arrest three years later.

If indeed CSIS hired Baratov, it's unclear if officials were aware of his Russian liaison. In a response to a request from The Spectator for comment, a CSIS spokesperson said that for reasons of national security and privacy, I can neither confirm nor deny the claims made by this individual."

As for why CSIS didn't help him upon his arrest, Baratov says he's not sure of the dynamic but figures the agency wanted to avoid conflict with U.S. authorities.

Baratov says the book title has multiple meanings, in part referencing the sense of disconnection he felt as a teenager: Life sucked, school sucked, everything sucked," he writes.

He grew up in Ancaster feeling like an alien" who didn't belong, but found refuge in front of his home computer.

His plunge down the cybercrime rabbit hole started at 12 years-old when his father asked him to recover his password and young Baratov searched how to hack emails" and email hack for hire."

A hacking service recovered his father's password and charged $50.

How is it possible?" Baratov writes. Also, I didn't even have fifty dollars. It didn't matter. The motivation burned like fire within me. I got to work."

He started charging $50 per recovered password. A woman named Irina" paid him $100 for helping discover her husband was cheating.

That was the moment that corrupted me," he writes. Wow, a hundred bucks! So easy!"

He planned to earn enough to buy a laptop and quit, but the laptop led to a TV; then a Mercedes at 16 before he even had his licence.

Was it greed or the challenge motivating him?

A bit of both," he says in the coffee shop. The more you get the more you want, but it's also like your baby; it grows, and seems legitimate, it didn't seem like I was doing anything wrong."

He reasoned, back then, that his hacking helped clients learn the truth about such things as infidelity, so he was doing something good."

He says his hacking was confined to email accounts involving clients who spoke Russian, and resided in post-USSR" eastern European countries.

Baratov suggests that his obsessive compulsive nature has influenced him in other facets of his life, including transforming his body.

He was fat" as a boy, he says, and took anabolic steroids in his late teens. He writes that steroids and weightlifting delivered him biceps that measured eighteen and a half inches," but also side effects: I don't have an aggressive personality, yet roid-rage made me get into fights at strip clubs, dent a car that door-scratched mine (perfectly reasonable), and lose a few friends (which isn't)."

He had liposuction surgery at 18 to get rid of loose skin," and writes that the doctor told him afterwards, upon seeing the teenager's Lamborghini, that he should have charged more.

Baratov served 12 months in Alameda County jail in Oakland, Calif., three months in a transit facility in Nevada, and three years between two prisons in Pennsylvania, including four months in solitary confinement, he says, when he was ratted out for seeking outside help to research the background of a fellow inmate who had been convicted for taking part in a child pornography ring.

In prison he wrote a diary and read more than 300 books to cope with the deadening silence. After his release, he studied books on writing and grammar, along with Memoir Writing for Dummies."

In person, Baratov comes off soft-spoken bordering on shy. But the voice in the book - reflecting his attitude from his youth, he says - is raw and brash.

He writes of meeting a Hamilton hooker" when he was 16, whom he paid $200 (more than asked"), drinking from a cup of coffee in Barton jail that he did not realize was spiked with crystal meth, and dodging shank attacks from inmates.

He likens his rapid rise and hard fall to Icarus; one chapter is called Too Close to the Sun."

He describes a suicide attempt using a razor blade, where he is astonished to discover the blade is too dull to slice his wrist. Baratov, who says he has always been agnostic about God, took it as a sign and never tried again.

He suggests it had been the incessant waiting for court dates in the U.S., adjournments and delays, staring at the same walls in the same cell - as well as soul-numbing boredom - that got to him.

As for the present, he has a girlfriend in Toronto but says he loves Ancaster and does not want to move.

He says he does not fear straying once more down the wrong path.

I would rather have a nice, calm, boring life as opposed to the crazy that was happening."

When he was released from prison in 2021, he had offers to earn a lot of money" to return to hacking, or to teach his techniques, but that world just doesn't interest me anymore."

Home, for now, is at his parents' place, but he expects to get his own house later this year. He hopes to one day run his own insurance brokerage.

Financially, his situation is not ideal but not bad," but he declined to elaborate. At the peak of his hacking, he says he was worth seven figures."

He adds that he will only have to pay the $250,000 (U.S.) fine he was assessed if he ever enters the U.S. - a country he is banned from visiting, along with the U.K., Japan, New Zealand and Australia.

But that's fine, I don't really care, as long as I can go to Mexico once in a while."

He sheepishly admits driving a nondescript car, but adds that he enjoys not having to worry about his Aston Martin getting keyed or having hamburgers thrown at it, as in the past.

Back in his days at Ancaster high school, he cut quite a figure, spending $25,000 on luxury clothes at Harry Rosen," he writes. I must have looked like a total weirdo, rocking $800 Dolce Gabbana dress shirts, $1,200 Armani jeans, $1,000 Hermes belts, and $2,500 John Varvatos shoes in public high school."

At the coffee shop, he wears earrings, a German-made watch and gold chain, but shrugs when asked about the items and says they aren't anything fancy.

He wears a black T-shirt and black pants. He stands six-feet tall, no longer boasts beefed-up biceps but looks lean and fit, from hitting the Good Life gym every day.

He no longer uses anabolic steroids, but takes testosterone replacement therapy; he says he has studied at length about the treatments, and adds that infertility is a possible side effect that he does not fear.

Baratov is open about most everything, in conversation and the book.

He read that if there are personal details you are too ashamed to include in your memoir, you aren't ready to publish.

(The book) is very open and honest," he says. I just wanted to get my personal story out, from my perspective. I didn't do it for the money."

On the topic of publishing, Baratov references the U.S. science fiction novelist who wrote The Martian."

Rejected by literary agents, the book was self-published, became a bestseller, and the rights purchased and made into a movie starring Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain, grossing $630 million (U.S.).

Baratov is no fan of the novel.

He just may have taken note of the business model, though.

At this point I'm open to anything," he says. He smiles. Obviously, legally."

Jon Wells is a feature writer at The Spectator. jwells@thespec.com