You may remember a while back in 2008 it was uncovered (at least publically) that DarkMarket was actually an FBI Sting Operation.

Insiders had apparently known since 2006 that one of the admins was actually an undercover FBI agent. Countless cases have gone to court with the evidence and contacts gathered in the DarkMarket forums. One example would be the Turk named Cagatay Evyapan (nickname Cha0) who got busted.

The latest news is one of the previous admins Renukanth Subramaniam (nickname JiLsi) has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud and admitted his involvement with the site.

A former London pizza delivery man faces a 10-year prison sentence after admitting he helped found the notorious DarkMarket forum for computer crime, several news sites reported.

Renukanth Subramaniam, a 33-year-old Sri Lanka-born man from North London, pleaded guilty at Blackfriars Crown Court in London to conspiracy to defraud and furnishing false information. Authorities say he joined DarkMarket on its first day of operation in late 2005 and helped build it into an online resource for payment card fraud, with a thriving exchange for buying and selling stolen data and its own secure payment system.

DarkMarket operated for three years and had about 2,500 members at its peak. To be accepted, candidates had to provide details of 100 compromised cards to reviewers, who would then verify their validity. Members were required to adhere to a strict code of conduct that forbid foul language and pornography and demanded a kind of honor among thieves.

Subramaniam was one of the earliest members on DarkMarket joining back in 2005 on its first day of operation and becoming an admin soon after that.

He’s facing a maximum sentence of 10 years, I’d imagine the sentence will come out to 2-3 years and with good behaviour he’ll be out of the cushy white-collar prison in 18 months or less.

So much for clamping down on crime eh? I shall reserve further judgment until we actually find out the real sentence.

Subramaniam worked as a site administrator until October 2006, when he was forcibly demoted over allegations of poor security hygiene. He continued as a reviewer until June 2007 and was arrested the following month when he turned himself in to police in Wembley.

DarkMarket was shuttered in September 2008 following the arrest of another site admin who called himself Cha0. According to news reports, the Turkish hacker was known as a supplier of high-quality skimmers for payment card fraud and was eventually accused of kidnapping and torturing a Turkish police informant.

A month later, another DarkMarket admin with the handle Master Splynter was outted as senior cybercrime agent J Keith Mularski of the FBI. The website, it turned out, had been secretly run from an FBI facility in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Also on Thursday, a second DarkMarket associate pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud. John McHugh, 69, of Doncaster, South Yorkshire, was alleged to be an experienced payment card fraudster who went by the online moniker Devilman.

It seems like a lot of the main players in the carding scene are getting shut down, at least those that show a public face.

Of course the underground will always continue to tick on, making money and hiding in the shadows.

So, just be careful where you shop online and always check the ATM for skimming devices!

Source: The Register

You may remember the story about the Pro ATM Hacker ‘Chao’ and his Tips a while back, apparently that was the start of a big global sting operation on credit card fraud.

Chao was admin/moderator on a community of carders (where they bought/sold stolen credit card info) called DarkMarket and the first to be busted, it turns out the site was actually ran by an FBI agent (J. Keith Mularski AKA Master Splynter) and operated by the National Cyber Forensics Training Alliance (NCFTA)

There have been many reports this week that fraud website DarkMarket, which closed earlier this month, was shut down because of an international intelligence operation, which has lead to up to 60 people being arrested.

All is not as it seems, however, as CNET is stating that the website was all part of an FBI sting operation. It all stems from an article in Wired, where they uncovered that the webmaster of the site was non other than J. Keith Mularski, a senior FBI agent, going under the guise of Master Splynter.

Splynter wrote on the site, just before its demise: “I guess it was only time before this would happen. It is very unfortunate that we have come to this situation, because … we have established DM as the premier English speaking forum for conducting business. Such is life. When you are on top, people try to bring you down.”

There have been multiple arrests in UK following the sting, it seems like this was a very long and rather successful operation taking down a number of key players.

60 arrests is a pretty decent number, each of them must have perpetrated quite a lot of fraud so you can imagine the money being saved with these guys behind bars.

The elaborate ruse is backed up by information uncovered by Südwestrundfunk, a German radio network, who found out the site was being operated by the National Cyber Forensics Training Alliance (NCFTA).

Sting or not, the closing down of the website has lead to 60 arrests, with one person charged with purchasing £250,000 pounds’ worth of stolen data in under two months.

Recent arrests in the UK have so far been made in Leicester, Manchester, Humberside, South Yorkshire and London. DarkMarket administrator Cagatay Evyapan, aka Cha0, was arrested by Turkish police at the beginning of September.

That’s a lot of stolen cards, I wonder how they even get all this information? I guess they have multiple ways with online info being exposed…a lot of the hacks don’t even get published, just covered up.

Then oldskool physical methods like tagging/cloning in petrol stations and restaurants, rigging ATM machines and just plain stealing the cards from the mail.

Source: Techradar (Thanks Navin!)