I remember back in ~2000~2001 there was some popular cart application floating around. Everyone used it! A google search of "/uri/somecart.cgi?something" brought up tons of pages... and of course, a vulnerability in the wild put everyone's information out on a silver plate for these card scavengers.<p>Well, luckily I was poor and 16 when they bounced and locked my card up right away(never buying from that tshirt store again).<p>Years down the line though, I still can find my name, old cc, and address on these lists. They're all over IRC...<p>On the topic of scamming, most of them use a reputation based system (ie. traderx has 60 successful transactions, while traderb has -3 successful transactions; who would you go with?)<p>You can also hire moderators to check out some things, iirc. Such as, placing a $0.03 charge through a merchant and verifying or checking the accounts.<p>I did a pretty large study of this back in 2003 or so, but really lost interest once I pissed off the wrong people and they got personal.
The article points out that the "cyber criminals prefer to get paid via Liberty Reserve and Western Union money transfer services." This is something I've always been curious about. Getting a credit card number + other info seems like it would be simple compared to getting those bytes converted into paper form without getting caught.
Why isn't there effective enforcement?<p>Is it:<p>-- Incompetence? Leadership, technical, other?
-- Low visibility to law enforcement? (In which case, why?)
-- Priorities? Well-placed? Misplaced?
-- Strategic? For ethical purposes?<p>The problem needs fixing, but it seems important understanding why we're at this point today when enforcement seems to obvious and simple. There's more than enough enforcement power available, at least in the U.S., to deal with the brazen criminals and make it much harder for them. Are those honeypots?
While this is certainly disturbing, I kinda wonder how much of the info being sold in this way is legit. I mean, if you scam your buyer by providing false info, what can they really do about it? Call the cops and tell them you got scammed while trying to buy stolen CC info online?
Am I just the only one who finds it strange that people sell credit card info? I mean, that'd be like if you saw a guy on the street selling dollar bills for 1/100 cent each. Sure, they might be marked bills from the same printing run, but they are still money being sold for less than their value.<p>You'd think if the harvester has the ability to harvest, he'd be able to work out a better way of monetizing credit cards than selling them at $2 a pop.<p>Or, maybe I just misunderstand how the people who buy the lists monetize the credit card info.