Russians are stealing more and more often. They steal a lot and well. And that's why they're heard. I easily earned 50-100 thousand dollars. And while I was working, maybe 2-3 hours a day.
I was already there, I was a little older, I was 21 years old. For all the time, it turns out that I earned $ 1.2 million for the first criminal case and for the second one. Most of the money that my colleagues and I had there was spent on a beautiful life. That is, these are restaurants, some trips to the islands.
Prostitutes, cars - these are such attributes of a luxurious life.
But I had one old client. We thought it was our client. My gang thought about it. And it turned out to be a special agent of the US Secret Service.
A former cybercriminal, probably from the highest echelon of power, originally from Belarus. Now I have been living in Moscow for almost five years. And I'm doing a legitimate business. I don't remember what year it started.
I'm 83 years old, and it started somewhere when I was 14.
That is, probably the 97th. And I got there by accident. At school, I was engaged in some completely legal commercial activity. Sale or resale of Internet access. Well, I've been selling as well as buying a few bloodshed "Cougars", something else, completely legal activity.
And then, by chance, on the bulletin board of a computer newspaper, where everyone was selling and buying it, I saw that someone was selling credit cards, other people's hacked card numbers. Again, someone I knew asked him to buy it. I bought it, that's all, he didn't pay for something there. And thus, I quite accidentally left a pool of these credit cards, I do not know. Maybe there were 500 of them.
And they were pretty cheap at the time. The retail price on the Internet was about a dollar for the number of one stolen card.
And I realized that you can, in principle, drive this credit card somewhere, in some online store, Western, preferably. And just someone else's credit card to pay for some product. By sending it to an address, well, not your own, of course, because you already understand that you are doing something not entirely legal.
And at the address of the so-called drop. Drops - these were people from among distant acquaintances, just some drunks. That is, figureheads. So if there is any investigation, the police will come to it-the police, and it will be impossible to find the ends there. And with such drops, I ordered products from Western online stores.
And this direction of carding, it was called carding clothes. It was not difficult to find the drops, because he receives a parcel for several thousand dollars, and this is the 90s. There the family could live on $ 100, eat for a month. And we paid 10-15 dollars for them to go through customs or go to the post office, pick up the parcel.
Basically, there were never any consequences for them.
Because Western stores-they wrote it off as a loss. As for the communities, at that time, large carder forums were already beginning to appear. At first, everyone knew each other. Because we happened to meet somewhere in the customs lines. And everyone understood who was doing what.
What's happening? And then there were carder forums. The first was a Russian-language forum Carder.org in the CIS countries. Then there was CarderPlanet, which is already known all over the world.
And we hung out on these forums. And there was such an atmosphere. At the peak there were maybe 3-4 thousand people.
That is, it is quite a bit. And everyone knew each other, helped each other.
We weren't afraid to meet in person offline back then. It was not uncommon for my brothers in the criminal trade - carders, hackers-to meet somewhere. In different countries. We had vacations together. And basically all the trade in prohibited materials and just the search for individuals and services, accomplices, was reduced to carder forums.
But the hackers, of course, got all the information.
But hackers, they are bad sellers. That is, they will hack into some database using credit cards, for example, from bank accounts, from ebay accounts. They don't know what to do with it. And my activity was that I basically understood where to get what and how to turn it into money.
That is, sell it to someone or build some kind of scheme yourself.
How to withdraw money from these accounts and cards. But maps were one of the areas I was involved in. In general, I did them for a very short time. Because there were more profitable schemes.
Around 2002, I was introduced to something called landfills. A dump is essentially a card number, well, all the associated numbers that are sewn to the magnetic strip of a plastic card. Using a dump, you can actually clone a real physical plastic card. And go to the store to buy something. Then there was no such restriction, as we have now in Russia, that for a thousand rubles, well, or three thousand under the new rules, you are required to enter a pin code.
Previously, this was not the case, and you could just use this cloned card to go and withdraw something, 15, 20, 50 thousand dollars-how much you can make a transaction.
It was just that the dump was quite expensive. If this card costs half a dollar or a dollar, then the dump is already $ 10, $ 50, or $ 100, depending on the country, bank, and card type. And ordinary cards were withdrawn by hacking into some online store. I don't know there, the sex shop was hacked, they got the customer base and cards from it.
It was harder to get dumps, but they were also hacked over the internet. But, for example, hotel chains were hacked. One of our victims was a Walmart. Specifically an American. The largest chain of stores.
Because they constantly flouted these safety rules. They have to set some complicated passwords in their terminals. Bank employees who install terminals, servers, and processing servers for them have ignored the security rules and set default passwords. And it was very easy to hack the entire network of email terminals. And take the saved dumps from them.
Now it's more complicated. It was mostly Russian hackers who broke in and got it all. When I got acquainted with landfills, there was such a scheme. You give the cards, you clone them yourself. And often there were such funny moments!
Here is a cashier, for example, according to the rules even now: you give him a card, if, for example, without a pin code, he can view its last name and first name.
This is reflected on the receipt, your last name is your first name. And they must match. In other words, the numbers on the receipt and on the card surface itself must also match. And we recorded, there is no disk with a magnetic stripe, well, what to record - you write it down either on an expired card, or on a used one, or even on a discount card "Magnet", you take the "Five" with a magnetic stripe.
If only he'd written it down, that's all. And only once in my life did I fail to buy some expensive clothes in some boutique. They said: "Why do you give some kind of discount card, not even Visa at all?" And so they were completely ignored altogether. As I said, we calculated using dumps recorded simply on discount cards.
I had mostly managerial functions. And one of the schemes was simply to take drops of such normal, trained people. Men, more often than not. Those who go to the store create a certain image for them.
Presentable appearance.
And they buy some watches, gold ones there. And such a guy goes shopping, jewelry, and just buys goods loaded. This was one of the schemes. They went abroad, on such whole tours. They were provided with documents and tickets.
They went to some Finland and bought everything there, bought everything that was with fake cards. You can't check how much money was withdrawn there. Naturally, they bought there for themselves. But as I said, sometimes they were arrested. It was profitable.
That's when I started trading these dumps. Because the databases that got into the hands of hackers, and then into my hands, were just huge. In one of my criminal cases, I think there are about 300 million, well, more than 200 million such landfills, right? And it is impossible, giving groups of your own people, it is impossible to work through them all. Because in any part of the card database, it dies every month according to the expiration date.
They just end. And so we quickly realized, me and the other traders, that we just need to sell them in bulk for $ 50-100.
And that's all. And in this way, we earned much more, many times more. And then the Chinese came to me.
Old enough. As old as my mother. They were buying up landfills. And, in turn, they provided us with amazing quality discs to record these dumps. That is, full duplicates, copies of Visa, Mastercard.
They were empty. That is, it is a Visa card, for example, with a micro font, with a high-quality hologram that cannot be torn off with a fingernail. And what we needed to do was with a simple device, it was called an encoder, well, just this thing with a slot, you just pass the card through it, like through a tape recorder, this plastic strip is just magnetized. In my day, it was worth a thousand dollars.
Now they are sold for $ 200.
This is completely legal equipment. Because any restaurant records its discount cards on exactly the same equipment. I sold garbage cans. Then he sold completely finished postcards. Naturally, even then I started selling documents, because people needed documents for purchases, especially for large amounts.
(c) Ruslan Bektimirov
I was already there, I was a little older, I was 21 years old. For all the time, it turns out that I earned $ 1.2 million for the first criminal case and for the second one. Most of the money that my colleagues and I had there was spent on a beautiful life. That is, these are restaurants, some trips to the islands.
Prostitutes, cars - these are such attributes of a luxurious life.
But I had one old client. We thought it was our client. My gang thought about it. And it turned out to be a special agent of the US Secret Service.
A former cybercriminal, probably from the highest echelon of power, originally from Belarus. Now I have been living in Moscow for almost five years. And I'm doing a legitimate business. I don't remember what year it started.
I'm 83 years old, and it started somewhere when I was 14.
That is, probably the 97th. And I got there by accident. At school, I was engaged in some completely legal commercial activity. Sale or resale of Internet access. Well, I've been selling as well as buying a few bloodshed "Cougars", something else, completely legal activity.
And then, by chance, on the bulletin board of a computer newspaper, where everyone was selling and buying it, I saw that someone was selling credit cards, other people's hacked card numbers. Again, someone I knew asked him to buy it. I bought it, that's all, he didn't pay for something there. And thus, I quite accidentally left a pool of these credit cards, I do not know. Maybe there were 500 of them.
And they were pretty cheap at the time. The retail price on the Internet was about a dollar for the number of one stolen card.
And I realized that you can, in principle, drive this credit card somewhere, in some online store, Western, preferably. And just someone else's credit card to pay for some product. By sending it to an address, well, not your own, of course, because you already understand that you are doing something not entirely legal.
And at the address of the so-called drop. Drops - these were people from among distant acquaintances, just some drunks. That is, figureheads. So if there is any investigation, the police will come to it-the police, and it will be impossible to find the ends there. And with such drops, I ordered products from Western online stores.
And this direction of carding, it was called carding clothes. It was not difficult to find the drops, because he receives a parcel for several thousand dollars, and this is the 90s. There the family could live on $ 100, eat for a month. And we paid 10-15 dollars for them to go through customs or go to the post office, pick up the parcel.
Basically, there were never any consequences for them.
Because Western stores-they wrote it off as a loss. As for the communities, at that time, large carder forums were already beginning to appear. At first, everyone knew each other. Because we happened to meet somewhere in the customs lines. And everyone understood who was doing what.
What's happening? And then there were carder forums. The first was a Russian-language forum Carder.org in the CIS countries. Then there was CarderPlanet, which is already known all over the world.
And we hung out on these forums. And there was such an atmosphere. At the peak there were maybe 3-4 thousand people.
That is, it is quite a bit. And everyone knew each other, helped each other.
We weren't afraid to meet in person offline back then. It was not uncommon for my brothers in the criminal trade - carders, hackers-to meet somewhere. In different countries. We had vacations together. And basically all the trade in prohibited materials and just the search for individuals and services, accomplices, was reduced to carder forums.
But the hackers, of course, got all the information.
But hackers, they are bad sellers. That is, they will hack into some database using credit cards, for example, from bank accounts, from ebay accounts. They don't know what to do with it. And my activity was that I basically understood where to get what and how to turn it into money.
That is, sell it to someone or build some kind of scheme yourself.
How to withdraw money from these accounts and cards. But maps were one of the areas I was involved in. In general, I did them for a very short time. Because there were more profitable schemes.
Around 2002, I was introduced to something called landfills. A dump is essentially a card number, well, all the associated numbers that are sewn to the magnetic strip of a plastic card. Using a dump, you can actually clone a real physical plastic card. And go to the store to buy something. Then there was no such restriction, as we have now in Russia, that for a thousand rubles, well, or three thousand under the new rules, you are required to enter a pin code.
Previously, this was not the case, and you could just use this cloned card to go and withdraw something, 15, 20, 50 thousand dollars-how much you can make a transaction.
It was just that the dump was quite expensive. If this card costs half a dollar or a dollar, then the dump is already $ 10, $ 50, or $ 100, depending on the country, bank, and card type. And ordinary cards were withdrawn by hacking into some online store. I don't know there, the sex shop was hacked, they got the customer base and cards from it.
It was harder to get dumps, but they were also hacked over the internet. But, for example, hotel chains were hacked. One of our victims was a Walmart. Specifically an American. The largest chain of stores.
Because they constantly flouted these safety rules. They have to set some complicated passwords in their terminals. Bank employees who install terminals, servers, and processing servers for them have ignored the security rules and set default passwords. And it was very easy to hack the entire network of email terminals. And take the saved dumps from them.
Now it's more complicated. It was mostly Russian hackers who broke in and got it all. When I got acquainted with landfills, there was such a scheme. You give the cards, you clone them yourself. And often there were such funny moments!
Here is a cashier, for example, according to the rules even now: you give him a card, if, for example, without a pin code, he can view its last name and first name.
This is reflected on the receipt, your last name is your first name. And they must match. In other words, the numbers on the receipt and on the card surface itself must also match. And we recorded, there is no disk with a magnetic stripe, well, what to record - you write it down either on an expired card, or on a used one, or even on a discount card "Magnet", you take the "Five" with a magnetic stripe.
If only he'd written it down, that's all. And only once in my life did I fail to buy some expensive clothes in some boutique. They said: "Why do you give some kind of discount card, not even Visa at all?" And so they were completely ignored altogether. As I said, we calculated using dumps recorded simply on discount cards.
I had mostly managerial functions. And one of the schemes was simply to take drops of such normal, trained people. Men, more often than not. Those who go to the store create a certain image for them.
Presentable appearance.
And they buy some watches, gold ones there. And such a guy goes shopping, jewelry, and just buys goods loaded. This was one of the schemes. They went abroad, on such whole tours. They were provided with documents and tickets.
They went to some Finland and bought everything there, bought everything that was with fake cards. You can't check how much money was withdrawn there. Naturally, they bought there for themselves. But as I said, sometimes they were arrested. It was profitable.
That's when I started trading these dumps. Because the databases that got into the hands of hackers, and then into my hands, were just huge. In one of my criminal cases, I think there are about 300 million, well, more than 200 million such landfills, right? And it is impossible, giving groups of your own people, it is impossible to work through them all. Because in any part of the card database, it dies every month according to the expiration date.
They just end. And so we quickly realized, me and the other traders, that we just need to sell them in bulk for $ 50-100.
And that's all. And in this way, we earned much more, many times more. And then the Chinese came to me.
Old enough. As old as my mother. They were buying up landfills. And, in turn, they provided us with amazing quality discs to record these dumps. That is, full duplicates, copies of Visa, Mastercard.
They were empty. That is, it is a Visa card, for example, with a micro font, with a high-quality hologram that cannot be torn off with a fingernail. And what we needed to do was with a simple device, it was called an encoder, well, just this thing with a slot, you just pass the card through it, like through a tape recorder, this plastic strip is just magnetized. In my day, it was worth a thousand dollars.
Now they are sold for $ 200.
This is completely legal equipment. Because any restaurant records its discount cards on exactly the same equipment. I sold garbage cans. Then he sold completely finished postcards. Naturally, even then I started selling documents, because people needed documents for purchases, especially for large amounts.
(c) Ruslan Bektimirov
