At the time, the mass media claimed he was a mathematician and had a degree in biochemistry from Saint Petersburg State Institute of Technology.
According to the coverage, in 1994 Levin accessed the accounts of several large corporate customers of Citibank via their dial-up wire transfer service (Financial Institutions Citibank Cash Manager) and transferred funds to accounts set up by accomplices in Finland, the United States, the Netherlands, Germany and Israel.
[citation needed] In 2005, an alleged member of the former St. Petersburg hacker group, claiming to be one of the original Citibank penetrators, published a memorandum under the name ArkanoiD on the popular Provider.net.ru website dedicated to the telecom market.
According to him, Levin was not actually a scientist (mathematician, biologist, or the like) but a kind of ordinary system administrator who managed to get hands on the ready data about how to penetrate Citibank machines and then exploit them.
ArkanoiD's group in 1994 found out Citibank systems were unprotected, and they spent several weeks examining the structure of the bank's USA-based networks remotely.