British Hacker Charged for Operating “The Real Deal” Dark Web Marketplace

A 34-yr-outdated U.K. nationwide has been arraigned in the U.S. for functioning a dark web market named The Authentic Offer that specialized in the revenue of hacking applications and stolen login credentials.

Daniel Kaye, who went by a litany of pseudonyms Popopret, Bestbuy, UserL0ser, and Spdrman, has been billed with 5 counts of access machine fraud and just one rely of dollars laundering conspiracy.

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Kaye was indicted in April 2021, and subsequently consented to his extradition from Cyprus to the U.S. in September 2022.

“Even though living overseas, this defendant allegedly operated an unlawful site that created hacking resources and login credentials available for obtain, together with these for U.S. governing administration organizations,” reported U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan.

Court documents clearly show that The Real Deal, until eventually its shutdown in 2016, functioned as a marketplace for illicit goods, like stolen account logins for U.S. govt desktops, financial institution accounts, and social media platforms these types of as Twitter and LinkedIn.

Also peddled as a result of the portal ended up plundered credit card information and facts, individual knowledge, botnets, hacking applications, unlawful medications, and weapons which ended up shown for sale by sellers, who had their own profile web pages that presented an choice to rank them.

Some of the U.S. federal government computer systems whose credentials were allegedly marketed by Kaye belong to the U.S. Postal Services, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Facilities for Illness Manage and Prevention, the Nationwide Aeronautics and Room Administration, and the U.S. Navy.

Kaye was previously arrested by the U.K. legislation enforcement authorities in February 2017, and was subsequently jailed for 32 months in January 2019 for attacking an African phone firm that knocked Liberia offline in 2016.

“[Kaye] ran a botnet employing a modified Mirai variant which distribute by way of zero-day exploits,” security researcher Marcus Hutchins noted in a series of Tweets. “Some of the DDoS attacks we observed have been peaking at about 1 Tbps.”

On top of that, the indictment accuses Kaye of conniving with just one or extra people going by the identify “thedarkoverlord” to sell Social Security quantities, not to point out launder the cryptocurrency proceeds of the sale by mixing expert services like Bitmixer.io to obscure the dollars trails.

“This circumstance is an illustration of our persistent willpower to do the job with our international partners to hold criminals accountable no make a difference how subtle their cyber fraud or their geographic location,” said Keri Farley, Specific Agent in Cost of FBI Atlanta.

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