Meet Brett Johnson, He turned it into an Empire
Brett Johnson, the administrator of ShadowCrew, turned the internet into a credit card fraud empire that netted him millions of dollars. That is, before he got caught.
Odds are pretty good that if you had your credit card information stolen between 2002 and 2004, it was resold on ShadowCrew, an online forum that served as a social media network for cybercriminals. If it was stolen between 2005 and 2008, it was most likely resold on ShadowCrew’s successors, CardersMarket or DarkMarket.
These criminal forums weren’t just for selling card information, thousands of criminals were on these sites day and night, comparing notes and tips on the best methods for creating counterfeit credit cards and fake IDs and, sometimes just simply chatting about their lives. These forums became their social life that created a sense of belonging.
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, commerce and financial databases went online and law enforcement became alarmed by the scale and complexity of this new kind of crime.
When the FBI and Secret Service tried to organize international busts to bring down the leadership of these forums, the masterminds slipped away, time and time again. The result was an ongoing cat-and-mouse game between police and thieves, featuring complex undercover operations, prison breakouts, and some of the largest—and most costly—data breaches in history.
The economy of stolen data is massive and mysterious. For the second episode of our Kernel Panic series, we explore the most devastating hacks and exploits in the history of the internet. We spoke to Brett Johnson, the administrator of ShadowCrew, Kimberly Peretti, the prosecutor who brought him down, and Keith Mularski, the FBI agent who went undercover on DarkMarket for two years posing as a spammer, while secretly running the forum from FBI servers.
With real footage of the forums and the insight of the actual criminals and law enforcement agents who defined this brand new kind of crime, we pull back the curtain to show you how these entirely digital crime syndicates worked.
Source: Mashable
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