Computer crime: credit card criminal ring exposed
Date: July 22, 2005Source: Computer Crime Research Center
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Yesterday Ukrainian police approved the fact that they arrested a group of people and Dmitri Golubov as a leader of the group suspectedly committing crimes with credit cards.
Police tracked Dmitri Golubov down after the FBI, secret service within the The Treasury Department of the US and the post inspection service of the US were engaged in the investigation of frauds using information from the Carderplanet.com website.
Ukrainians have been talking about the upsurge of fraudulent actions at the ATMs for months. Thus Ukrainian branches of the Raiffeisen bank started to warn their clients about the high risks of withdrawing money in Ukrainian ATMs. Then the bank blocked all operations with their cards in Ukraine. The point is that swindlers began to withdraw money from the cards used once in Ukrainian cash dispensers. Raiffaisen effort was supported by two Russian banks, Slavyansky (The Slav Bank) and Master-bank. After that MasteCard and after a while Visa, international payment systems, admitted that a burst of compromise of credit card information occurred in the fall of 2004.
Only in July Ukrainian law enforcement achieved first positive results in the investigation of credit card crimes. On July 20, Vladimir Shilomentsev, deputy chief of the high tech crime unit of the Interior Ministry of Ukraine, informed that police arrested Dmitri Golubov suspected of creating carders' website Carderplanet.com. This site offered stolen pin codes and numbers of credit cards.
"We confirm the fact that we have got Golubov", he said yesterday. "Though he was arrested according the open criminal case being investigated. Thus all information related to Dmitri Golubov and his crimes is a secret of investigation".
Founded in 2001 Carderplanet.com used to be a trading floor selling data from the stolen bank accounts in the US, the UK and the rest of the world. 7,000 people were involved in the operation of the website. The site had an English blog, forum, where hackers placed stolen information from the banks, web trade portals, state authorities of the USA, the UK and Australia.
The Wall Street Journal wrote last week that CarderPlanet boasted roughly 7,000 members and served as a marketplace for millions of stolen accounts, according to Larry Johnson, special agent in charge of the U.S. Secret Service’s criminal investigative division.
Many of the stolen accounts came from hackers who targeted dozens of organizations such as banks, e-commerce sites and government agencies in the U.S., U.K. and Australia. Stolen account information can sell online for as little as a few dollars and as much as several hundred dollars.
CaderPlanet was closed last year but the U.S. authorities continued chasing its founders worldwide, Delovaya Nedelya wrote.
U.S. Postal Inspector Paul Crenn reported that Dmitry Golubov who took an active part in CarderPlanet operations under the nickname of Script was arrested on July 7.
Delovaya Nedelya failed to get in touch with Golubov’s defense lawyers. Ukrainian authorities refused to comment while the U.S. officials did not rule out that more arrests would follow in the near future in Ukraine.
CarderPlanet was set up in 2001. A man by the name of Douglas Cade Havard, 22, has pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering and is now in a Leeds prison cell in Great Britain.
At 19, Havard was honing counterfeiting skills he learned in online chat rooms, making fake IDs in Texas for fellow underage college students who wanted to drink alcohol, Wall Street Journal reported. By 21, Havard had parlayed those skills to a lucrative position at CarderPlanet.com. Having reached a senior rank in the largely Russian and Eastern European organization, he was driving a Mercedes and spending hundreds of dollars on champagne at clubs.
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