Three dozen criminal carding sites were seized on Wednesday by the FBI, as part of a two-year investigation conducted with authorities in Europe and elsewhere.
The sites were set up as automated vending carts to sell hundreds of thousands of stolen bank-card and bank-account data. Authorities claim that more than 2.5 million “items of personal and financial information” were seized over the last two years, a vague wording that doesn’t say exactly how many accounts were affected.
The seized domains include CVVPlaza.com (above), ccstuff.net, mynickshop.us, freshcc.org, vncards.org, ccstore.biz, bhshop.us, freshshops.biz, and 444pay.org. The seizures represent only a temporary blow to carders, however, since the sites are likely to spring up on new domains. But since the carding details recovered by authorities have been passed to financial institutions, many of the card details previously sold on these sites will no longer belong to active accounts, requiring carders to seek fresh supplies.
The Serious Organized Crime Agency in the UK worked with the FBI as well as with authorities in Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, Romania and Ukraine to seize the sites and arrest two men in the UK who are suspected of making large-scale purchases from the sites.
A suspected site operator based in Macedonia was also arrested by the Macedonian Ministry of Interior Cyber Crime Unit.