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U.S. Govt. Appears To Have Nabbed Kurupt.su Carding Kingpin
tsu doh nimh writes "The Justice Department on Monday announced the arrest of a Dutch man wanted for coordinating the theft of roughly 44,000 credit card numbers. The government hasn't released many details about the accused, except for his name and hacker handle, 'Fortezza.' But data from a variety of sources indicates that Fortezza was a lead administrator of Kurupt.su, a large, recently-shuttered forum dedicated to carding and Internet fraud. Krebsonsecurity.com provides some background on Fortezza, who 'claimed to be "quitting the scene," but spoke often about finishing a project with which he seemed obsessed: to hack and plunder all of the other carding forums.'"
RTFA, Krebs almost seems sympathetic for the guy.
I don't care much for the whole extradition-to-the-US thing, but this is not your average whitehat/greyhat hacker, highlighting security issues by breaking systems, or for the lulz.
This is card skimming pond scum, doing it for profit. Good riddance, I say.
this hero of the people taking from the evil banks and redistributing back to the little people will never lose
It was credit card fraud. The only people that lose are the shops who take credit cards and maybe a few rich people who don't check their statements.
If the banks were losing out from this though would change the credit card system.
Interestingly enough, it was a restaurant owner in Seattle who tipped the feds off, after angry customers contacted him about additional $70-90 charges on their checks. So yeah, he was really sticking it to the banks.
It's certainly not victimless: any merchant who doesn't have insurance is getting screwed by the fraudster, any merchant who does have insurance (because of all the credit card fraud) is getting screwed by the insurance company.
Your numbers are also off - good credit card numbers can go for $30 - $45 depending on the type of card and where it's from:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/06/16/137181702/the-tuesday-podcast-inside-the-credit-card-black-market
and the idea that a guy working in a restaurant would do this... Well, if he was very stupid then maybe. But he'd get caught in no time once this restaurant was identified as a common point of use between all these stolen cards.
"If the banks were losing out from this though would change the credit card system."
They're definitely losing big money but they're doing so much business that the losses don't have a material impact on their profits. Millions or maybe tens of millions vs. tens or hundreds of billions. Not enough to justify the expense of updating all the point-of-sale systems(they already have the technology to do this) and certainly not enough to make them want to change their policies of giving easy credit to anyone with a pulse.