21 Million German Bank Accounts For Sale

anerva writes "Black market criminals are offering to sell details on 21 million German bank accounts for €12M ($15.3M), according to an investigative report (German; Google translation) published Saturday. In November reporters for WirtschaftsWoche (Economic Week) had a face-to-face meeting with criminals in a Hamburg hotel, according to the magazine. Posing as buyers working for a gambling business, the journalists were able to strike a price of €0.55 per record, or €12M for all the data. They were given a CD containing the 1.2 million accounts when they asked for assurances that the information they would be buying was legitimate." 21 million is three in four existing German bank accounts.

Comments

Hmmm...

[RobertM1968]

You'd think they'd have gotten the police involved instead of trying to scoop a story...

Nah, guess not.

How to use???

[It doesn't come easy]

21 million is a lot of accounts. No one person or group has time to abuse all 21 million accounts in a timely fashion. More likely, one would need to rely on the lackadaisical attitude most people have when it comes to security coupled with a low volume approach to the number of transactions to an external account in order to profit from purchasing all 21 million accounts.

The purchaser would also have to consider just how many accounts would be accessible and for how long. It might not be practical to expect to make significantly more than 12 million euros even with 21 million accounts, since most accounts would probably have low balances or have their passwords, etc., changed rather quickly if the account had a high balance.

So to use this many accounts, one would need to set up a number of new accounts in other banks (a few at a time and more than one so that the number of transactions to a given account would not be too high), then siphon a little bit of money off a few stolen accounts to some of the new accounts, withdraw the money, then close the new accounts almost immediately. The amount withdrawn would need to be random and small enough to escape detection for at least a few days. Anything faster would surely raise suspicion and cause automatic transaction blocking (at least, if the banks have some kind of working fraud prevention), especially since the announcement of the stolen data up for sale. I can also imagine adding a fraud check for a slurry of never-seen-before transactions to new accounts. Wire transfers would be quickest, yet they would also stand out more (since a bunch of new wire transfers from accounts which had never made a wire transfer before would be unusual -- the likely case for most accounts).

The 12 million price tag seems like a number arrived at by the thieves after taking into account the difficulties to be faced in exploiting the 21 million accounts while they are still exploitable. It seems likely that any purchaser would in turn sell them again in smaller blocks (a lot safer that way, relatively speaking).

Wonder if we'll ever find out what eventually happens?

I did it last week

[ZiggyM]

I live in Lima Peru. Last week a teller at my bank made me wait 10 minutes while she waited for the safe to open to give me some cash. In the meantime I went to a computer terminal without a keyboard, and access to only a webpage with the bank rates (windows, no start menu, no access to desktop etc). The machine was supposedly locked so that you couldnt navigate away or do anything except scroll the page and click a few links. Well, they forgot do disable right-click. 7 steps later I was able to access their internal network, and had access to a lot of internal information on individual machines. I went to the branch manager and showed him. He was surprised and embarassed, and took note of the steps I took. It was amazing how easy was to do it. The 7 steps were clever, but not impossible.

Re:21 million is 3/4 of accounts?

[quarrel]

I had the same reaction re the number of accounts. It is small.

However, Germany isn't all that small.

So some back of the envelope calcs:

They claim 21/.75 = 28M bank accounts in Germany

It's got roughly 80M people. Assume something like 2.2 people per househould (dunno what it is in Germany), and you get 36M. You gotta figure each household has at least one. I don't know how things really work in Germany, but I assume they're like the rest of the developed world and you essentially can't function without a bank account.

Then there are businesses. Even very small businesses will run several accounts.

I think the 28M bank accounts is just bullshit. It's gotta be heaps higher.

Surely 100M wouldn't be that big a figure even?

--Q