International sting takes down online marketplace of stolen identities

A criminal online marketplace selling millions of stolen identities for as little as 56p has been taken down in an international crackdown.

The marketplace had 80m sets of personal credentials available for sale, covering 2 million people.

The NCA carried out a series of raids on Tuesday and arrested 19 suspected users of the site, while globally about 120 people were arrested and more than 200 searches carried out.

The NCA estimates there were hundreds of users of the site in the UK, and that tens of thousands of British victims have been targeted.

The marketplace could be found using normal internet search engines, as well as on the dark web, and users were offered step-by-step guides on how to buy stolen details as well as how to use them for fraud.

Prices started from 70 US cents (56p) and went up to several hundreds of dollars, depending on the type of information available.

Businesses as well as individuals had their information sold on Genesis Market, which facilitated fraud, ransomware attacks (where hackers block access to data and demand payment to release it) sim-swapping (where mobile phone numbers are hijacked) and the theft of source code from companies.

NCA investigators have already set up spoof distributed denial-of-service sites, which bring down servers by flooding them with requests, to harvest the details of criminals, and may use similar tactics when it comes to fraud sites.