Busy Month for the Feds! Genbucks Raided and DarkMarket Shutdown.

[xmcp123]

It's been a busy month or so for the feds! Looks like they've got the whole "interwebs" thing down pretty well nowadays.

GenBucks
Hot of the presses of NANAE, GenBucks (AKA sancash) finally is feeling the results of a previous raid, and will likely see effects far beyond the 200k each civil fine. Genbucks had a second spam e-mail affiliate program named sancash they recruited non-compliant email spammers to promote(they primarily recruited on the popular success of specialham.com).
More dox here
(note: Nearly all spam cases on this level involve money laundering and botnets, but cases take longer to prepare for those)

DarkMarket
On October 4th a popular forum for identity/credit card theft crooks went dark for good. The reason given was that one of the sites administrators had gotten it unwanted attention by torturing and kidnapping a police informant.
What was not revealed until recently(by a German paper first) was that apparently the other head admin, "Master Splynter" was a federal agent (that's right. Agent. Not informant).
This is actually the second time a large carding board turned out to be run by a federal agent or informant. The third large carding/identity theft bust from recent(ish) memory was the infamous "ShadowCrew" bust, and was also quite similar.


Now for a bit of irony. If you read the DarkMarket story, you will recall "Master Splynter" was the federal agent.

(Source)


Thoughts? Reflections? Comments?

 

[Bofu2U]

owned?

 

[xmcp123]

Forgot to mention. If you read this old blog entry and scroll a bit into the comments, you actually get to see the infighting of a lot of the carders. Do searches on the screenames they use/mention and you'll see some seriously interesting stories too.

 

[ImagesAndWords]

Interesting reads, thanks for sharing.

Genbucks always had that "not exactly 100% legit" smell lingering from it. I know some guys made serious bank with it though.

 

[PhillipMarlow]

kids listening to their damn rap music

 

[loyolabenson]

it was only a matter of time.

 

[JamesH]

Found this while searching one of the usernames: I Was a Cybercrook for the FBI

Interesting stuff.

 

[Rage9]

Found this while searching one of the usernames: I Was a Cybercrook for the FBI

Interesting stuff.

Heck of a good read.

 

[HarveyJ]

So Shady, were you down with some of these guys?
Any inside news?

Man, all that card skimming stuff always fascinates me.
There was a big bruhaha about it down under a couple of months back, and then it's gone straight off the radar again.

Back in uni I was actually thinking of buying one of the magnetic swipe read/write devices floating around on eBay to scam photocopy credits and sell cards loaded with a couple hundred... Such small time thinking hehe.

 

[xmcp123]

So Shady, were you down with some of these guys?
Any inside news?

Man, all that card skimming stuff always fascinates me.
There was a big bruhaha about it down under a couple of months back, and then it's gone straight off the radar again.

Back in uni I was actually thinking of buying one of the magnetic swipe read/write devices floating around on eBay to scam photocopy credits and sell cards loaded with a couple hundred... Such small time thinking hehe.

I was never into the whole carding scene. Far as I'm concerned, it's utter shiite. There's a line you have to draw at some point, and those guys never did. I've known one or two in my day though.
I've known the stuff surrounding genbucks for awhile.
No inside news though. Inside news is bad news with lotsa pending investigations around. Ignorance is bliss.

 

[Albus Finch]

Very interesting stuff and a pretty impressive operation from the FBI.

Had to laugh at this joke/comment on the Wired Article:

I sell dumps
very fresh
aproove rate 99%
write me to dumps@fbi.gov

Posted by: master_splynter | Oct 13, 2008 4:12:56 PM

 

[FortunePlaza]

Where do I buy my cards now?