Forty Year Old Gelsenkirchener Faces Charges for Buying Stolen Data on Darknet

 

A forty-year-old man from Gelsenkirchen has been charged by the court of Essen for being responsible for large scale fraud with fake bank transfers.

Personal credit card numbers of some banks are widely distributed on the Darknet for sale, and Gelsenkirchen and Germany at large have their own share of the available fake credit card numbers.

According to a report, investigators undertook a large scale investigation with the main focus on Bavaria. This followed the recent cases of transfer fraud all over Germany, and the Gelsenkirchener was revealed to have been working since Wednesday.

Internet fraud is a serious crime across Europe. The CISO of bitsdigits, a counter and social intelligence agency with headquarters in Germany and Columbia, SC, Salted Hash once said that not placing the necessary importance on personal identities including credit cards is a bad habit.

Bank fraud and credit card scamming is not new in Germany. Two men were arrested just last year for acquiring credit cards on the Darknet for ticket scams.

The Fraudsters take advantage of one’s negligence to leak their data on the Dark web.

According to the prosecutor, the convicted suspect lived near Hartz IV. He was a genius in creating fake bank transfers using the fake data bought on the Darknet marketplace. There are forums on the Darknet which provide tutorials on how to go about committing the criminal act, and it is likely that the Gelsenkirchener learned his fraud skills there.

The defendant admitted having purchased personal data of some unknown people from a Darknet marketplace. After payment was made in Bitcoin, he received the necessary data which included the name, address, account number, and bank code of the victims.

The suspect has a bank account in Poland, to which all money was transferred to, after submitting a transfer request. He, therefore, produced proof sheets with a color laser printer and filled them out by hand. This was to make the transfer request genuine.

The police conducted a search in his apartment in Gelsenkirchen. A pestle, revolver, two snags and a pump-gun were seized.

The court said that the suspect attempted about thousand transfers but most of them failed with 80 being successful. About 34 of those successful attempts now constitute the charge of € 50,000.

Martin Hahnemann, the Judge Conrad Electronic bill of July 28, 2015: “OKI printer, 209 euros with 10 per cent extra discount.”

Just this year, Germany collaborated with two other countries: Latvia and Britain to raid homes which led to the arrest of online bank fraudsters. Many other countries are planning on putting all online bank fraudsters behind bars.

The root of all these crimes comes from the Darknet where the necessary data needed to make all fake bank transfers. The Darknet has been targeted by the authorities to raid all criminals who make use of its anonymity.

Others believe that leaking credentials on the Darknet should not be attributed to the powerful hacking skills of the hackers, but instead, the weakness of data sets.

J. Tate said: “The information collected in this trove, no matter which data-broker or marketing enrichment system it came from is now in the hands of people that you will never know. What uses they provide to both marketers and nefarious scam artists are endless. This is my biggest concern, the data sets that are popping up around the world are not secured as regulation mandates, are providing easy to access credentials and intelligence points to facilitate complex identity fraud, human trafficking, and money laundering operations across the globe.”

In 2015, it was released that credit card fraud and online bank fraud was increasing in Germany. Martin Warwick, FICO’s fraud chief in Europe made a statement about the strategies of the fraudsters which seem to work today. He said: “Criminals are constantly adapting their strategies. It looks as if they are targeting transactions in smaller amounts, presumably because they think it is easier to avoid counterfeit transactions being detected.”

The 40-year-old Gelsenkirchen suspect likely used that strategy to transfer small amounts of money into his other bank account in Poland, to avoid being suspected.

The efforts of the authorities to arrest the online bank fraudsters are gradually paying off, and this criminal act is expected to decrease in response to recent measures being put in place. Europol for instance has taken considerable steps to arrest card fraudsters on the Darknet.