14 DAY TRIAL // Jay Moore, known by his online moniker as t0pp8uzz, and his accomplice Damian Horne, aka GM, have been sentenced to jail after investigators accused them of running a fraud website worth an estimate of £26.9 million ($41 million or 33.2 million EUR).
According to UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) Moore pleaded guilty to 12 fraud-related charges, hacking, and money laundering and received a 3-year jail sentence. Horne received 21 months after he also pleaded guilty.
The fraudsters managed to earn a lot of money after Moore (photo) launched the Freshshop, a site that intermediated the sale of stolen financial information. Horne was his right-hand man, in charge of “assisting” him.
They started timidly with selling stolen iTunes vouchers and online gaming codes on eBay, but soon enough they expanded their criminal activities to commercializing credit card details. To reach their goals, they relied on a network of bank accounts, online financial institutions and money exchange companies from abroad.
The Freshshop the cybercriminals were running looked like any other online retail store, but instead of the usual items, they were actually selling credit card data.
The valuable information was obtained not only from their own hacking operations, but also from other individuals who were looking for a way to sell the data they had stolen by breaching websites.
When authorities raided Moore’s home back in 2011, they found tens of thousands of pounds in cash, along with a number of computers connected to the Freshshop. They also found the card details of around 340,000 individuals.
He apparently gave his father around £40,000 (49,000 EUR or $61,000) to help him purchase a farm house and he bought a luxury car for himself. The fraudster told his parents that the money came from his apparently legit web design business.
Besides Moore and Horne, investigators have identified two other individuals, friends with the mastermind, who have been recruited to collect money from Western Union locations in Bristol.
Currently, SOCA is trying to identify the other cybercriminals who have been using the fraud site.