A symbiosis of legal and criminal: how technologies developed in carding are becoming a driver of "honest" fintech

[Professor]

Prologue: The Inconvenient Truth of Innovation​

The history of technology is replete with examples of cutting-edge solutions emerging from the fringes of society, in an arms race between criminals and defenders. Cybercrime, and particularly carding, has long been a hidden driver of progress in financial technology. By 2026, this process has emerged from the shadows: methods honed in the underground are not simply being copied by the legitimate market — a complex symbiosis is emerging, blurring the lines between criminal innovation and breakthrough fintech solutions, creating a new ethical and technological reality.

Part 1: Reverse Engineering a Crime: What Fintech Learned from Carders​

Carding has always been a laboratory for stress testing financial systems. Legitimate companies began systematically studying its methods not for imitation, but to deeply understand vulnerabilities and create proactive defenses that became new products in their own right.

1. Social engineering as a basis for UX/UI:
   • What carders stole: User attention and trust through personalized phishing scenarios.
   • What fintech has implemented: The principle of hyper-personalization and proactive service. While a carder analyzes social media to offer a false solution to a problem, a banking app, using the same analysis methods (with the user's consent), offers a real one: "We see you often take taxis. Here's personalized insurance for the passenger" or "You transfer money to this service — would you like to subscribe with a discount?" The trigger is the same — a deep understanding of the context. The goal is the opposite — building loyalty, not theft.
2. Automation and micromanagement of attacks (botnets):
   • What the carders stole: They used botnets for mass but individual testing of stolen cards on various sites, adapting to limits and rules.
   • What fintech has implemented: Swarm intelligence technologies for personal finance management. Decentralized autonomous agents (DAAs) are emerging that, like a botnet but acting on behalf of the client, simultaneously monitor hundreds of trading platforms, banks, and insurance companies, finding the best conditions for currency exchange, loan refinancing, or insurance purchases. The architecture is the same, but the transaction sign is opposite.
3. Simulation and bypass of verification systems (Anti-Detection Tech):
   • What carders stole: They developed complex methods to disguise legitimate traffic and use residential proxies (digital fingerprint substitution) to bypass geoblocks and anti-fraud measures.
   • What fintech has implemented: These same technologies form the basis of next-generation private banking services. Clients can activate a "digital camouflage" mode, which makes their financial requests to third-party APIs (for example, when aggregating data from multiple banks) appear as legitimate but anonymized traffic, protecting their financial history from profiling by third-party companies. The fight for privacy is using tools designed to anonymize crime.

Part 2: Direct Technology Transfer: When a Tool Changes Owner​

Some tools are so effective that, once defused, they move to the bright side, becoming the core of new legal business models.

1. Carding forums as software marketplaces:
   • For decades, dark forums have been honing tools for automating payment systems, parsing data, and bypassing captchas.
   • Transfer: Teams of former "ethical hackers" or companies that purchased these tools through intermediaries are legalizing them. CVV parsers are being transformed into B2B platforms for competitive price analysis in retail. Software for generating phishing pages is being repurposed into no-code platforms for rapidly prototyping legitimate financial web services for startups.
2. Drop and logistics schemes:
   • Carders have created global, fail-safe networks to physically receive goods using mules, drop addresses, and reshipping schemes.
   • Transfer: These logistics developments formed the basis of decentralized fulfillment services for microbusinesses. Platforms that utilize a network of independent fulfillers ("drops") to quickly deliver goods from marketplace warehouses, minimizing costs. Risk-sharing algorithms, so that a single intercepted "drop" doesn't compromise the entire network, are now protected by legal courier services.
3. Money Laundering (Mixing, Layering) and DeFi:
   • The criminal underworld pioneered the use of cryptocurrency mixers, cross-chain swaps, and complex transaction chains to launder funds.
   • Transfer: The same principles of decentralization and transaction obfuscation (but without the purpose of concealing a crime) form the basis of Privacy DeFi. These are legal protocols that allow companies to hide contract amounts from competitors, and individuals to maintain the confidentiality of their investments without breaking the law. The technology is the same, but the regulatory status and audit transparency are different.

Part 3: Symbiosis: The Gray Zone of Contact​

A new reality is emerging, where flows of technology, data, and even personnel circulate between worlds.

1. General information and the "Shadow Graph":
   • Anti-fraud systems at major banks secretly purchase data from carding forums and leaks through intermediaries to train their AI models on current fraudulent schemes. This "dark knowledge" becomes a key asset. At the same time, carders study the banks' public security research to identify weaknesses. This creates a vicious cycle of information exchange.
2. Personnel migration and “dual-use laboratories”:
   • Talented developers who started out creating botnets or exploits are increasingly receiving legitimate offers from fintech companies with the message, "We value your innovative experience." R&D departments are springing up, with some of the team consisting of former cybersecurity specialists with a "deep understanding of the enemy's mentality."
   • Dual-use startups are emerging that officially sell tools for stress testing and fraud investigation, but their software can be used to launch attacks with minimal modifications. Regulators are failing to keep up with this ambiguity.
3. Wild Testing:
   • New financial protocols (especially in DeFi and metaverses) are de facto stress-tested for free by carders. A vulnerability discovered and exploited by criminals in the first hours after a service's launch becomes a valuable signal for developers to immediately patch it. Criminals act as rigorous and impartial QA engineers.

Part 4: Ethical and Regulatory Impasse​

This symbiosis raises complex questions that have no simple answers.

• Innovation vs. Complicity: Where is the line between learning an adversary's methods and tacitly encouraging criminal activity through purchasing their data/tools?
• Rehabilitation vs. Risk: How ethical is it to hire former cybercriminals, even if they haven't been convicted? Are we creating "werewolves" with access to the core of financial systems?
• Control over "dual technologies": How to regulate tools that are equally useful for pentesting and real-world attacks? Strict controls will stifle security innovation, while their absence will provide ammunition to criminals.

Conclusion: The New Ecosystem – An Eternal Arms Race as the Driver of Progress​

By 2026, it became clear: carding and fintech are not just adversaries. They are symbiotic poles of a single ecosystem of financial innovation. Their confrontation is a perpetual motion machine that:

1. Accelerates the adoption cycle: Technologies born underground are legitimized and adopted in months, not years.
2. Increases overall resilience: Systems forged in constant combat against advanced opponents become incredibly durable.
3. Blurring the boundaries: The boundaries between defense and attack, crime and law, become porous for technology, ideas, and personnel.

The future belongs not to those who try to completely eradicate the dark side of innovation, but to those who learn to manage this symbiosis. Those who can build transparent and ethical channels to "sterilize" criminal innovation, creating powerful immune systems for the financial world, while simultaneously providing social and professional adaptation mechanisms for talent from the shadow economy.

This is not a brave new world. It is a complex, contradictory, and dangerous world, where progress comes at a price and has a hidden agenda. But it is precisely in this complexity that the next generation of financial technologies is being born, the ones that will shape our lives in the coming decades. The race continues, but its rules and course no longer belong to any one side.