On the eve of "Black Thursday", the Russian banks' liquidity crisis of August 1995, Anton Dolgov, the head of the Moskovsky Gorodskoi Bank, disappeared leaving debts of around $100m.

Yesterday, after hiding behind dozens of aliases, Dolgov stood in the dock of a London court as the head of an international identity theft gang that had defrauded thousands of account holders out of millions of pounds.

Police believe the internet-based enterprise, which operated from Notting Hill, west London, ran undetected for 10 years. Huge numbers of compromised credit cards were used to buy electrical goods, later sold to customers on eBay, and to gamble on sporting fixtures.

A library of false documents and a bogus firm of solicitors were used to generate fictitious identities and open hundreds of bank accounts to hold the huge amounts of illicit cash flooding in.

Dolgov, who pleaded guilty at Harrow crown court to four conspiracy charges under one of his false names, Anton Gelonkin, was caught after his headquarters stuffed with state-of-the-art computers and encryption software - was broken into. The police were called. Nothing had been stolen but they made a note of his name - Gelonkin.

Weeks earlier, police had raided the Spanish end of his operation. The raid resulted in an international warrant for Anthony Peyton - alias Gelonkin. The Interpol notice was picked up in London and the serious and organised crime organisation launched Operation Tertiary.

In January last year Dolgov's offices were raided, but the haul would almost certainly have been much greater had not one of the gang's members, Estonian Aleksei Kostap, thrown a power switch which blanked out the bank of computers on which the operation relied and triggered layers of encryption.

Despite the evidence against him, including false passports bearing his photograph, Kostap, 31, insisted he had been framed. But after an 18-day trial he was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud and perverting the course of justice. He, Dolgov and a Lithuanian, Romanos Vasilauskas, 24, who pleaded guilty to possessing three false passports with intent, will be sentenced on December 13.

David Hewett, prosecuting, told the court Gelonkin was the "general manager", while a shadowy figure called Kaljussar was thought to be the mastermind. Their scheme was based on huge numbers of false identities and compromised credit cards in the UK, US and Spain and several other European countries.