A special law enforcement operation undertaken by Russia has led to the seizure and shutdown of four online bazaars that specialized in the theft and sales of stolen credit cards, as the government continues to take active measures against harboring cybercriminals on its territory.
To that end, the domains operated by the card fraud forms and marketplaces, Ferum Shop, Sky-Fraud, Trump’s Dumps, and UAS, were confiscated and plastered with a banner that warned “theft of funds from bank cards is illegal.” Also embedded into the HTML source code was a message asking, “Which one of you is next?”
The seizures were orchestrated by the Department “K,” a division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation that focuses primarily on information technology-related crimes, according to Flashpoint. In a related development, state-owned news agency TASS said that six Russian individuals were being charged with “the illegal circulation of means of payment.”
The four platforms are collectively said to have made over an estimated $263 million across Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ether, blockchain analytics company Elliptic said. Ferum Shop, active since October 2013, made as much as $256 million in Bitcoin from stolen card sales, accounting for nearly 17% of the stolen credit card market.
The UAS Store, a popular seller of stolen remote desktop protocol (RDP) credentials and operational since November 2017, netted around $3 million in cryptocurrency proceeds, with carding store Trump’s Dumps making around $4.1 million since setting up shop in October 2017.
images from Hacker News
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