Stolen credit cards: the business

28/06/2007 Written by Alberto Redi (halfmoon)

There are hun­dreds of meth­ods used by Cyber pranksters to steal data and make money online, but some­times their non­cha­lance in per­pe­trat­ing such ille­gal acts gets close to arrogance.

For exam­ple, con­sider the theft of credit cards num­bers. There is an unimag­in­able num­ber of doc­u­mented cases show­ing how stolen credit cards are used by cyber crim­i­nals to “go shop­ping” online or to run busi­nesses where such cards are sold to third par­ties for a ridicu­lous price… but that’s not all.

Indeed, Panda Soft­ware ‘s blog reported yes­ter­day the news about a Russ­ian Web­site sell­ing Tech­no­log­i­cal prod­ucts that are openly said to have been bought using stolen credit cards.

As you can see in the image below, the Russ­ian text says that the web­site offers lap­tops, cell phones and other items for 20% of their real value.

The rea­son for a sim­i­lar dis­count can be found vis­it­ing the FAQ sec­tion of the web­site, where the ques­tion “How can you offer such good prices?” is answered with the statement:

“It’s very sim­ple. We buy these prod­ucts in West­ern coun­tries with stolen credit cards. You don’t run any risk when pur­chas­ing these prod­ucts.” …Wel­come frankness!

In such web­site there is also a “Part­ner Sec­tion”, invit­ing web admin­is­tra­tors to join the busi­ness: “part­ners” would be given a code they should include on their web­site. This sim­ple oper­a­tion would make them get 25% of the money com­ing from they website.