Fergie's Tech Blog

Global Trail of an Online Crime Ring

Brad Stone writes in The New York Times:

The indictments last week of 11 people involved in the group give a remarkably comprehensive picture of how the Internet is enabling new kinds of financial crimes on a vast international scale.

In interviews over the last few days, investigators detailed how they had tracked Mr. Gonzalez and other members of a ring that extended from Ukraine, where a key figure bought and sold stolen numbers over the Internet, to Estonia, where a hacker infiltrated the servers of a Dallas-based restaurant chain.

The criminals stored much of their 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 for use in cash machines, investigators say.

“This was the largest hacking and theft of credit and debit card information ever successfully investigated and prosecuted within the United States,” said Craig Magaw, special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s criminal investigative division. “This case shows that there are no more boundaries.”

posted by Fergie @ 8/11/2008 08:45:00 PM