Inside a stolen credit-card site

Cory Doctorow 3:23 am Wed Sep 22, 2010

Brian Krebs brings us a fascinating look at the inner workings of a site that sells stolen credit card numbers to fraudsters; the site is structured like a bizarro-world PayPal, with soft come-ons, hidden fees, and lots of upsell pressure.

The trouble is, the minute you seek to narrow your search using the built-in tools, the site starts adding all these extra convenience fees (sound familiar?). For example, if I were going to buy a card stolen from anyone around the Washington, D.C. area, it would probably be from a resident of McLean, Va., which is more or less a tony place where plenty of well-to-do folk reside. Anyway, the site found me a card (a MasterCard) belonging to a McLean resident alright, but then the service wanted to tack on an extra $.60 just because I isolated my search by city and state — raising the cost in my shopping cart to $2.10! No way, Jose. Not this bargain shopper.

I'll Take 2 MasterCards and a Visa, Please

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