You're nicked!
A trio of teens who set up and ran an internet crime forum called Gh0stMarket.net have been sentenced to up to 5 years in custody.
The police reckon losses from thousands of credit details swapped over the website, dubbed ‘Crimebook', amount to a staggering £16.2m, The Guardian reported.
The forum apparently had 8,000 members and has been linked to hundreds of thousands of pounds of losses from over 65,000 bank accounts.
The site's founder, Nicholas Webber was reportedly arrested in October 2009 along with the site's admin guy, Ryan Thomas after they attempted to pay a £1,000 hotel bill with stolen card details. The pair were aged 18 and 17 at the time and Webber has now received 5 years in jail, while Thomas got 4 years for their crime.
The police seized Webber's laptop as part of the investigation and apparently discovered details of 100,000 stolen credit cards as well as a trail back to the website. The pair reportedly jumped bail fleeing to Majorca in December 2009 but were re-arrested when they flew back to the UK in January last year.
The court apparently heard how Webber used an offshore bank account in Costa Rica to process money from the frauds as well as how he threatened on the site's forum to blow up the leader of the police e-crimes department, tracing the officer's address.
It is believed Thomas was recruited as his ‘right hand man' after the pair discussed music downloads online. Thomas reportedly deleted spam and enabled messages between criminal and the site's forums
The site was believed to let hackers and fraudsters trade stolen details such as account numbers, passwords and pins anonymously as well as house manuals including "14 ways of hacking credit cards," plus guidance on how to make explosives and crystal meth.
The third member of the team, Gary Kelly got 5 years inside and apparently helped design software used to break into thousands of computers and steal details, as well as running a web platform that hosted the Gh0stmarket site.
Matthew McCabe, prosecuting, reportedly said: "The Gh0stMarket forum had approximately 8,000 members worldwide. It existed simply to facilitate the criminal trade in compromised credit cards, access to online bank accounts and distribution of malicious software and computer hacking tricks."
