Credit Card Crime

Hazel Inglis/ 9/26/08 / 8:10am / global crime

An international ring of thieves have obtained tens of millions of credit and debit card numbers from nine of the biggest retailers in the United States. The feds were able to indict 11 people last week with the help of Albert Gonzalez, who had been arrested and gave up information to avoid jail time in 2003. A key player in this operation was in Ukraine were they bought and sold stolen numbers over the internet to Estonia, where a hacker infiltrated the servers of a Dallas-based restaurant chin. The criminals stored most of their stolen data on computer servers in Latvia and Ukraine, and purchased blank debit and credit cards from confederates in China, which they imprinted with some of the stolen numbers to use in cash machines. Some of the key players in this ring of thieves were Maksym Yastremskiy of the Ukraine, who is believed to be among the largest distributors of stolen debit and credit card numbers in the world; earning him $11 million in 2004-2006. He was arrested in Turkey; there was also Aleksandr Suvorov, an Estonian hacker, who was arrested in Frankfurt. Gonzalez, who was thought to be helping the Secret Service ended up to be still very much involved in the operations and is now behind bars in New York.

This article amazes me because of the mass amount of credit and debit card numbers they obtained and also that the article said that most of the people involved had never met. They were working together international in cyberspace and breaking into corporate computer systems nationwide. I do not know how you would get involved in something like this; do you goggle that you want to steal millions of credit and debit card numbers? It also is a reminder that we are all vulnerable to this type of thing now that everything is computerized and that the world is becoming more and more globalized.

http://news.cnet.com/Global-trail-of-an-online-crime-ring/2100-7348_3-6245150.html