US and Euro Police Smash Cybercrime Marketplace

The US authorities have teamed up with law enforcement in Europe to dismantle a prolific underground marketplace, despite the fact that its administrators remain at substantial.

SSNDOB built extra than $19m from marketing personally identifiable details (PII), including individuals’ names, dates of delivery, email addresses, passwords, credit score card quantities and Social Security quantities. Most of the victims listed on the internet site, close to 24 million, are stated to have been American.

The FBI and IRS teamed up with Latvian and Cyprus legislation enforcement authorities to execute seizure orders yesterday towards various domains affiliated with the web-site: ssndob.ws, ssndob.vip, ssndob.club and blackjob.biz.

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The organization product of the marketplace was like that of lots of some others: people paid cryptocurrency to its directors in return for accessibility to PII, which could then be applied in observe-on phishing attacks, extortion and identification fraud.

As very well as requiring customers to fork out for solutions in Bitcoin and Litecoin, SSNDOB’s admins utilized online pseudonyms and managed servers in numerous international locations in get to protect their anonymity. As is the scenario with most cybercrime endeavors, time and revenue was put in on promotion on the dark web and furnishing buyer assist to people, in accordance to the Department of Justice (DoJ).

“Identity theft can have a devastating impact on a victim’s long-time period psychological and economic wellness. Taking down the SSNDOB internet site disrupted ID theft criminals and served hundreds of thousands of Individuals whose own info was compromised,” stated special agent in demand, Darrell Waldon, of the IRS-Legal Investigation Washington, DC Discipline Workplace.

“Special agents with IRS-CI’s DC Cyber Crimes Unit will keep on to perform with the US and worldwide law enforcement community to end these complex scams, no matter of where by the dollars path qualified prospects them.”

In accordance to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, the services obtained around $22m in Bitcoin because 2015 across 100,000 transactions, with some “power users” spending over $100,000 on bulk buys of PII.

“Perhaps most intriguing of all, though, is the action we see concerning SSNDOB and Joker’s Stash, a massive darknet market place focused on stolen credit rating card info and other PII that shut down in January 2021,” Chainalysis explained.

“Between December 2018 and June 2019, SSNDOB sent over $100,000 worthy of of Bitcoin to Joker’s Stash, suggesting the two marketplaces may perhaps have had some relationship to one a further, which include quite possibly shared possession.”