You Can Be Anyone-Anyone Can Be You

An
absolutely terrifying article in the New York Times exposes the felonious
details of what happens to that stolen credit card and personal financial
information we’ve been hearing so much about. It is a whole world
of wanton and open criminal activity, protected by the anonymity of
the internet and the difficulty of serving paper on servers in the
lawless
frontier of the former Soviet Union.

"
Want
drive fast cars?" asks an advertisement,
in broken English, atop the Web site iaaca.com. "Want live in premium
hotels? Want own beautiful girls? It’s possible with dumps from Zo0mer." A "dump," in
the blunt vernacular of a relentlessly flourishing online black market,
is a credit card number. And what Zo0mer is peddling is stolen account
information – name, billing address, phone – for Gold Visa cards and
MasterCards at $100 apiece.

It is not clear whether any data stolen from CardSystems Solutions, the payment processor reported on Friday to have exposed 40 million credit card accounts to possible theft, has entered this black market. But law enforcement officials and security experts say it is a safe bet that the data will eventually be peddled at sites like iaaca.com – its very name a swaggering shorthand for International Association for the Advancement of Criminal Activity.

from the New
York Times