The Big Ring

By | July 13, 2005

Good piece today by my WSJ colleague Cassell Bryan-Low on the Douglas Havard case which I mentioned a week or so back: As Identity Theft Moves Online, Crime Rings Mimic Big Business (subscription only, I suspect):

Most identity theft still occurs offline, through stolen cards or rings of rogue waiters and shop clerks in cahoots with credit-card forgers. But as Carderplanet shows, the Web offers criminals more efficient tools to harvest personal data and to communicate easily with large groups on multiple continents. The big change behind the expansion of identity theft, law-enforcement agencies say, is the growth of online scams.

Police are finding well-run, hierarchical groups that are structured like businesses. With names such as Carderplanet, Darkprofits and Shadowcrew, these sites act as online bazaars for stolen personal information. The sites are often password-protected and ask new members to prove their criminal credentials by offering samples of stolen data.

Shadowcrew members stole more than $4 million between August 2002 and October 2004, according to an indictment of 19 of the site’s members returned last October by a federal grand jury in Newark, N.J. The organization comprised some 4,000 members who traded at least 1.5 million stolen credit-card numbers, the indictment says.

The organizations often are dominated by Eastern European and Russian members. With their abundance of technical skills and dearth of jobs, police say, those countries provide a rich breeding ground for identity thieves. One of Carderplanet’s founders was an accomplished Ukrainian hacker who went by the online alias “Script,” a law-enforcement official says. As with many of its peers, the Carderplanet site was mainly in Russian but had a dedicated forum for English speakers.

Well worth a read as it details how Havard’s UK operation worked.

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