Clan Wars: The Most High-Profile Conflicts and Showdowns in the History of the Carding Community

[Professor]

About Real-Life Clan Wars, Database Leaks, and Revenge​

Introduction: A Darknet "Game of Thrones"
The world of carding is often romanticized as a community of brothers in arms against the system. However, beneath the surface of anonymous screen names, equally passionate, and sometimes bloody, passions simmer: a struggle for power, resources, and reputation. This is a true digital clan war, where the weapons are not bullets, but database leaks, doxxing, account hacks, and manipulation on shadow exchanges. These conflicts reveal the true nature of the community: the lack of honor among thieves and the fragility of trust in a world of total deception.

A classic: Vendetta between Carder.su and FraudCrew​

The essence of the conflict: In the late 2000s and early 2010s, two of the largest Russian-language carding forums, Carder.su and FraudCrew (fc.name), waged a fierce war for influence, users, and, most importantly, money.

• Reason: The eternal dispute over who's the boss, who was the first, who "leaked" someone else's sellers. The conflict was exacerbated by the personal ambitions of the administrations and mutual accusations of collaborating with law enforcement.
• Methods of warfare:
  1. Doxing and threats: Admins and moderators on opposing sides published dossiers on each other, complete with real passport information, addresses, and family photos. Threats of physical violence were common.
  2. Hacking and defacement: Hacking a competitor's website and posting derogatory messages on the homepage.
  3. Provocations and leaks to the police: The dirtiest tactic. One side could anonymously leak data on active users or even administrators of a competitive forum to law enforcement in order to physically destroy it.
  4. Information warfare: Creation of fake screenshots, compromising correspondence, accusations of scam against major guarantors.

The result: The war weakened both resources, diverting resources to internal squabbles and sowing paranoia among users. Ultimately, both forums fell victim not so much to each other as to global law enforcement operations, but this feud became a textbook example of the self-destructive nature of the criminal underground.

The "Lefty" Case and the $3 Million Revenge: Russian-Style Cyberattack​

The essence of the conflict: A classic "got ripped off" story in digital format. In the mid-2010s, a high-profile carder nicknamed "Lefty" developed a unique, highly profitable method for cashing out through a payment system. He sold exclusive access to this method to a select group of people for $3 million.

• Betrayal: One of the buyers, instead of using the method, hacked into the Lefty infrastructure and stole the source code and algorithms to sell them himself, violating the terms of the deal.
• Lefty's Revenge: Instead of quietly retreating into the shadows, Lefty launched an all-out war of annihilation. He single-handedly:
  1. He hacked and made publicly available the databases of all major competing carding shops and forums where the offender and his circle were involved.
  2. Conducted a series of DDoS attacks of such power that they disabled key resources for weeks.
  3. "Flooded" (spammed with complaints) crypto exchanges and exchangers through which a group of competitors worked, achieving the blocking of their accounts.
  4. He publicly disgraced the thief on all reputable platforms, with evidence.

The result: The reputation of the thief and his partners was completely destroyed. "Lefty" demonstrated that the underground has its own criminal justice system , and even among swindlers, there are those who adhere to the "rules." The story became a legend and a warning: cheating your own people is not worth it.

Civil War in Anonymous: Operation Darknet vs. Carders​

The essence of the conflict: Not all hacker groups tolerate carders in their ranks. In 2011, some Anonymous activists, adhering to the ideology of fighting for freedom of information, initiated Operation Darknet.

• Goal: To eradicate child pornography and other "moral filth" from the darknet. Several closed Tor forums were hacked during the raids.
• In a surprising twist, the hacked data included massive databases of logins, passwords, and transactions from carding forums that used the same infrastructure.
• A war of ideologies: Anonymous publicly condemned carders as "greedy profiteers" who have nothing in common with the ideals of hacktivism. They released some of their carding databases publicly, causing millions in losses to the community.
• Carders' response: The carders, in turn, called Anonymous "clowns" and launched technical counterattacks, attempting to disable their resources. The conflict escalated into an ideological standoff between "commercial" and "ideological" hacking.

Result: The operation dealt a serious blow to the carding infrastructure and demonstrated that even in the anonymous world, irreconcilable ethical divisions exist. This was a rare case where carders suffered not from the police, but from other hackers.

Modern Telegram Wars: Botnets vs. Channels​

In the era of Telegram (2020s), wars have become more fleeting and technological.

• Methods:
  1. Mass Complaints and Channel Bans: Competitors organize coordinated campaigns to send mass complaints against an opponent's Telegram channel or bot, leading to its blocking by the platform.
  2. Cloning and Phishing: Creating mirror channels with similar names to intercept and deceive clients.
  3. DDoS attacks on bot servers, disabling them.
  4. Bribery of admins of large carding chats to block and defame a competitor.
• The essence of the conflicts: The fight for audiences in a context where every channel is a business. Wars are waged not over ideas, but over traffic and advertising revenue (sales of databases, access to software).

Anatomy of War: Rules and Consequences​

1. There are no neutrals. In any major dispute, forum or channel users are forced to choose sides. Neutrality is considered treason.
2. The main weapon is information. Compromising evidence (doxing), database leaks, and chat logs are more deadly than any virus.
3. Real physical danger. Online wars often escalate into real-life threats. There have been cases of doxxing leading to car fires and physical attacks.
4. It's beneficial to law enforcement. Such conflicts are a gift to the intelligence agencies. Embittered participants readily expose their rivals, providing them with ready-made evidence and dismantling the groups from within.
5. Loss of trust and migration. After every major war, the community loses trust. Users migrate to new, more closed platforms, and the industry becomes even more paranoid.

Conclusion: A Nest of Vipers That Stings Itself
The wars in the carding community prove a simple truth: a system based on deception cannot be stable . Even among those who professionally break the law, there is no solidarity — only temporary alliances that collapse under the weight of greed and ambition.

These conflicts are not epic battles, but dirty, petty, and cynical showdowns between criminal entrepreneurs. But they are precisely these that are the most effective internal destabilizing factor. While carders fight each other, they spend resources not on perfecting attacks against banks, but on self-destruction. This is the irony and weakness of their entire digital kingdom: having built the perfect machine for stealing trust, they have never learned to trust each other. Their wars are the best illustration of how, in a world where everything is for sale, honor is always the first to sell.