An illicit on-line marketplace called SSNDOB was taken down in operation led by means of U.S. law enforcement companies, the department of Justice (DoJ) announced Tuesday.
SSNDOB trafficked in private records together with names, dates of birth, credit score card numbers, and Social safety numbers of approximately 24 million individuals within the U.S., producing its operators $19 million in sales sales.
The action noticed the seizure of numerous domain names related to the market — ssndob.ws, ssndob.vip, ssndob.club, and blackjob.biz — in cooperation with government from Cyprus and Latvia.
consistent with blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, SSNDOB’s Bitcoin payment processing machine has received nearly $22 million well worth of Bitcoin across over a hundred,000 transactions in view that April 2015.
moreover, bitcoin transfers to the track of greater than $one hundred,000 have been unearthed between SSNDOB and Joker’s Stash, another darknet marketplace that specialized in stolen credit score card statistics and voluntarily closed store in January 2021, indicating a close courting among the 2 crook storefronts.
“The SSNDOB directors created advertisements on dark web criminal boards for the market’s services, furnished customer support capabilities, and regularly monitored the sports of the sites, inclusive of monitoring when customers deposited money into their accounts,” the DoJ said in a declaration.
moreover, the cybercriminal actors are stated to have employed tactics to hide their genuine identities, consisting of the use of nameless on line profiles, maintaining servers in different countries, and requiring ability buyers to use cryptocurrencies.
“identity theft could have a devastating effect on a sufferer’s long-time period emotional and financial fitness,” stated Darrell Waldon, special agent in rate of IRS-CI Washington, D.C. area office. “Taking down the SSNDOB website disrupted identification theft criminals and helped thousands and thousands of american citizens whose non-public facts changed into compromised.”
The takedown marks the continued ramping up of efforts on the a part of regulation enforcement corporations across the world to disrupt malicious cyber pastime.
ultimate week, Europol publicized the shut down of the FluBot Android banking trojan, at the same time as the Justice branch said it seized 3 domain names utilized by cybercriminals to change stolen non-public statistics and facilitate allotted denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks for hire.
in advance this 12 months, the Federal Bureau of research (FBI) additionally neutralized a modular botnet dubbed Cyclops Blink as well as dismantled RaidForums, a hacking discussion board notorious for selling get right of entry to to hacked non-public facts belonging to customers.
In a related development, the U.S. Treasury branch also sanctioned Hydra after German regulation enforcement government disrupted the arena’s biggest and longest-running dark net market in April 2022.
