Carder gets the red card
An Indiana man has been sentenced to 14 years in prison for selling counterfeit payment cards that caused more than $3 million in losses. He was also ordered to forfeit more than $2.8 million in proceeds and pay a $250,000 fine.
When the US Secret Service raided 21 year old Tony Perez's apartment in June 2010, they found the stolen information on 21,000 credit cards along with blank cards and the equipment needed to turn them into clones of the originals. Perez used "carder forums", sites on the internet where card fraudsters openly trade credit card details and which brazenly proclaim "we are here to help you make money".
Some of these forums seem to act with impunity, being hosted anonymously on overseas servers beyond the reach of the UK and US courts. However, the fact that they are not totally underground opens up cracks which can be exploited. The card details obtained from these forums can be used by banks and security companies to identify compromised cards and the sources of their data, the money trail can sometimes expose the carders, and in some cases the forums themselves are created by the FBI as sting operations against the criminals. Hopefully the stiff sentences like the one handed out to Perez will help convince the internet fraudsters that crime is not a profitable use of their talents.
27th September 2011