21 Year Old Botnet Operator Stole $30,000

Gary Kelly, 21, from Manchester (England), recently admitted in a post on the underground forum that he not only operated, but also got US$ 30,000 using a forged credit card.

Kelly is among the five people who were accused in August 2010 for fraud and other organized criminal activities relating to a private online forum called GhostMarket.net. This market consists of almost 8,000 members.

As per the UK Police Central eCrime unit, the suspects got illegal access to systems and fake tutorials and instructions for making crystal meth with the help of GhostMarket.net that provided credit card data, credit card verification programs and harmful computer programs

Officials inform that two of the accused (except Kelly) took into custody in January 2010 with a laptop carrying details of nearly 100,000 credit cards, which could add up to US$ 18.7 Million and which linked them to GhostMarket.net.

Chief research officer for antivirus and computer security company F-Secure, Mikko Hypponen, states that this case looks interesting because of Mr. Kelly's posting of a long message about the underground forum, as per the news by Informationweek.com on August 16, 2010.
As per the post, Kelly was in problem in November 2009 with regard to Zeus and other stuff associated with GhostMarket.net. He adds that CC fraud, ZeuS (15k infections) with like 2m logs (6GB), scamming a casino 10k GBP, another 9k from WU (Western Union) got him on, as per the news by Informationweek.com on August 16, 2010.

In simple words, he was charged with credit card frauds, employing financial crimeware toolkit Zeus, running a scam against a casino for $15,600 and unlawfully getting $14,050 through Western Union.

Further, Kelly guesses some reasons for how he was caught and stated that either his ISP has been observing, or he used an unauthentic (sic) domain for Zeus, which he paid by a credit card in his own name. Either way he fails and got detected.

Lastly, the criminal trial of the five charged GhostMarket.net operators will start in October, and surely has some headline-making revelations.

Related article: “Loopholes did not cause online banking thefts”: ICBC

» SPAMfighter News - 8/26/2010