The US authorities have teamed up with police in Europe to dismantle a prolific underground marketplace, while its directors continue to be at large.
SSNDOB manufactured much more than $19m from providing personally identifiable information and facts (PII), which include individuals’ names, dates of delivery, email addresses, passwords, credit rating card quantities and Social Security numbers. Most of the victims mentioned on the site, all over 24 million, are reported to have been American.
The FBI and IRS teamed up with Latvian and Cyprus legislation enforcement authorities to execute seizure orders yesterday towards numerous domains related with the web page: ssndob.ws, ssndob.vip, ssndob.club and blackjob.biz.
The organization design of the marketplace was like that of quite a few other people: visitors paid out cryptocurrency to its directors in return for obtain to PII, which could then be utilised in comply with-on phishing attacks, extortion and identity fraud.
As very well as demanding consumers to pay out for expert services in Bitcoin and Litecoin, SSNDOB’s admins applied on the internet pseudonyms and maintained servers in various international locations in get to preserve their anonymity. As is the circumstance with most cybercrime endeavors, time and revenue was expended on marketing on the dark web and giving client assist to people, according to the Department of Justice (DoJ).
“Identity theft can have a devastating effects on a victim’s extended-time period emotional and monetary wellbeing. Using down the SSNDOB website disrupted ID theft criminals and assisted tens of millions of Us citizens whose own information was compromised,” stated special agent in demand, Darrell Waldon, of the IRS-Criminal Investigation Washington, DC Area Office environment.
“Special agents with IRS-CI’s DC Cyber Crimes Device will continue on to function with the US and worldwide regulation enforcement neighborhood to conclude these advanced scams, no matter of wherever the money trail qualified prospects them.”
In accordance to blockchain analytics organization Chainalysis, the service gained all over $22m in Bitcoin considering that 2015 throughout 100,000 transactions, with some “power users” expending in excess of $100,000 on bulk buys of PII.
“Perhaps most intriguing of all, while, is the action we see among SSNDOB and Joker’s Stash, a significant darknet sector concentrated on stolen credit rating card information and facts and other PII that shut down in January 2021,” Chainalysis explained.
“Between December 2018 and June 2019, SSNDOB despatched above $100,000 worth of Bitcoin to Joker’s Stash, suggesting the two markets may possibly have had some marriage to 1 another, such as potentially shared ownership.”
Some parts of this article are sourced from:
www.infosecurity-magazine.com