Ever wanted to buy a stolen credit card?

Mar 26, 2008 21:56 GMT  ·  By

Stealing credit cards and selling them on the web is almost a phenomenon these days as there are several ways to find such a 'merchant'. However, one of the most popular methods to sell stolen information was actually a website, apparently hosted by Google's Blogger, which gained impressive popularity in the last few weeks. According to Vnunet, security firm Finjan spotted the website some time ago and revealed some important details about the entire selling process.

First of all, the interested buyers could acquire a sample of the credit cards in order to be sure that they're not fakes. What's interesting is that the website was based on traditional commerce techniques as the sellers made discounts for larger amounts of credit cards.

"Prices are segmented depending on whether a card is a Classic Visa or MasterCard, a premium account such as a Gold, Platinum or Business/Corporate card and its country of issue. Prices typically range from $38 per set of card data for premium card accounts in small volumes, going down to $10 for Classic card data in volumes of 100 or more," Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer at Finjan, told Vnunet. "Customers are also being offered a trial set of data, as well as a guarantee on account details that do not work."

This is not the first time when malicious websites are trying to sell information that may really harm other Internet users. For example, there are some pages out there that attempt to sell software vulnerabilities that would allow hackers or bad-intended persons to exploit them in order to gain control over an affected computer. Obviously, the security companies around the world struggle to discover such vulnerabilities as soon as they occur and patch them before the malicious code is used in dangerous activities.