The under­ground credit card sales and security

When you’re shop­ping for stolen credit and debit cards online, there are so many choices these days. A glut of stolen data — com­bined with inno­va­tion and cut­throat com­pe­ti­tion among ven­dors — is con­spir­ing to keep prices for stolen account num­bers excep­tion­ally low. Even so, many read­ers prob­a­bly have no idea that their credit card infor­ma­tion is worth only about $1.50 on the black market.

Don’t you just hate it, though, when online stores nickel and dime you to death? I started to get that chintzy vibe when I opened an account at rock3d.cc, one of many sites where one can buy stolen Visa, Mas­ter­Card, Dis­cover and Amex card infor­ma­tion. The pur­loined card num­bers — no doubt lifted from PCs infected with data-stealing mal­ware like the ZeuS Tro­jan — fetch $1.50 for U.S. accounts, and $4 (USD) for accounts belong­ing to U.K. residents.

And for a pre­mium, you can obtain “fullz,” or the card data plus other use­ful infor­ma­tion about card­hold­ers, such as their date of birth, mother’s maiden name, etc.

The trou­ble is, the minute you seek to nar­row your search using the built-in tools, the site starts adding all these extra con­ve­nience fees (sound famil­iar?). For exam­ple, if I wanted to buy a card stolen from any­one around the Wash­ing­ton, D.C. area, it would prob­a­bly be from a res­i­dent of McLean, Va., which is more or less a tony place where there are plenty of well-to-do folk. Any­way, the site found me a card (a Mas­ter­Card) belong­ing to a McLean res­i­dent alright, but then the ser­vice wanted to tack on an extra $.60 just because I iso­lated my search by city and state — rais­ing the cost in my shop­ping cart to $2.10! No way, Jose. Not this bar­gain shopper.

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Posted on “Kerbs on secu­rity”

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