How Stolen Credit Cards are sold

Have you ever wondered how criminals who hacked, phished or stole Credit Card information sell them later on? I mean, where would you go and sell the stuff and where would a buyer look to find it? One possible way is to create a blogspot blog and sell it from there. Sounds to easy to be true ? Read on to find out..

Dante send me this interesting article from Techworld that describes the mechanism behind selling Credit Cards. They are sold in so called dumps which seems to be packs of one hundred numbers starting from $10 per 100 for regular Visa and Mastercard Credit Cards up to $150 for European Gold and Platinum cards.

Techworld calls it a Credit Card Supermarket which does not seem to fit the website at all in my opinion. It looks pretty spammy, probably to keep regular visitors from exploring the website. I think it is interesting to note that there is no obvious way to contact the sellers other than to reply with a comment on your own which would make a seller pretty vulnerable to investigations unless they take extra precautions.

Update: Sites that are selling stolen credit cards obviously do not last very long on today's Internet. Even with precautions like buyer verification before allowing access, it is only a matter of time before they get taken down by local authorities.

It is however interesting to note that you find a lot of stores online that sell credit card information. Some of those sites may be honeypot operations though, as it seems highly unlikely that sites like these will stay online for more than a couple of weeks or months tops.

These sites often sell other data as well, which could range from PayPal accounts to log in information.

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