DarkMarket and Lord Cyric
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DarkMarket administration.
The trouble is/was, DarkMarket is an FBI sting site.
Says Wired »»»
DarkMarket.ws, an online watering hole for thousands of identify thieves, hackers and credit card swindlers, has been secretly run by an FBI cybercrime agent for the last two years, until its voluntary shutdown earlier this month, according to documents unearthed by a German radio network.
Reports from the German national police obtained by the Südwestrundfunk, Southwest Germany public radio, blow the lid off the long running sting by revealing its role in nabbing a German credit card forger active on DarkMarket. The FBI agent is identified in the documents as J. Keith Mularski, a senior cybercrime agent based at the National Cyber Forensics Training Alliance in Pittsburgh, who ran the site under the hacker handle Master Splynter.
The NCFTA is a non-profit information sharing alliance funded by financial firms, internet companies and the federal government. It’s also home to a seven-agent FBI headquarters unit called the Cyber Initiative and Resource Fusion Unit, which evidently ran the DarkMarket sting.
The FBI didn’t return a phone call Monday.
Ironically, the site was closed down not because the bad guys had become wise to it.
Rather, “Until this afternoon, SpamHaus listed Master Splynter as an Eastern European spammer named Pavel Kaminski, who was active as recently as 2005,” says Wired, adding:
“Lord Cyric, another former DarkMarket administrator, says Master Splynter was invited onto DarkMarket as an admin about two years ago, and was still known as a spammer. Based in Canada, Lord Cyric has sold fake IDs and checks in the underground, but he’s convinced he’s out of reach of any sting operation.
” ‘Worry? Me? Nah,’ he wrote in an IM interview. ‘It’s a long, slow hard process for them to interest Canadian [law enforcement] to go after someone who doesn’t touch drugs nor deals with skimmers. … It’s all about U.S. busts, unless there’s a big drug deal and DEA gets involved’.”
Secret fraud board
Said Josh on ComplaintWIRE last year
I was looking to purchase a laptop computer at wholesale and someone I had spoken to many times in a chat room sent me to someone who calls himself “Lord Cyric” from Canada. “Lord Cyric” assured me that he could get me a great price on a new laptop and ship it to me from Canada. He gave me a choice of 4 different models, each which retailed for around 2500 and offered my choice if I would Western Union 1700 to him in Canada.
I sent the money, and “Lord Cyric” disappeared. I have been hunting for “Lord Cyric” since.
Recently, I discovered that “Lord Cyric” is in truth a ruling member of a huge identity theft syndicate on the internet located at www.darkmarket.ws
www.darkmarket.ws is a secret fraud board where millions of stolen identities and stolen credit card numbers are sold and bartered on a daily basis. After investigating this enterprise, I have found that I am by no means the ONLY one this band of crooks has ripped off.
International, federal, and state authorities were notified, but, “I was told at the federal level that ‘Lord Cyric’ could not be involved in scamming me because he is some sort of government associate and is restricted from doing such things,”says Josh, adding:
“They suggested that someone was using the online moniker ‘Lord Cyric’ falsely and used it to rip me off. ‘Can’t be our guy’, they said, ‘he is monitored too closely’.”
Stay tuned.
Wired – Cybercrime Supersite ‘DarkMarket’ Was FBI Sting, Documents Confirm, October 13, 2008
ComplaintWIRE – Huge identity theft syndicate hides behind the government, June 30, 2007
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October 15th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Wow, this explains why Identity Theft has become such a major problem the past few years. The FBI is selling people’s identity and then telling people “well, you shoulda shredded your trash”.
The police get tons of money every year from the government, but Bush cut their funding resulting in the police resorting to mafia-based bribery, speeding tickets, property seizure, and identity syndicate cooperation.