Test Shows How Fast Stolen Card Data Can Spread

A fraud investigator who posted faked credit card data online and then planted links to the website in chatrooms reported that within 15 minutes of posting, 74 "carders" from 31 countries viewed the page.

Investigator Dan Clements, who operates the anti-fraud website CardCops.com, said that after one weekend, more than 1,600 potential thieves had viewed the page. Using tracking software, Clements determined that those would-be card thieves hailed from 75 countries, with the top three being Indonesia, the U.S. and Romania.

Clements said he planned to identify as many individual IP addresses as possible, and then inform the respective Internet Service Providers of the illegal activity, along with providing the data to the FBI and the Secret Service. According to Clements, the web page he created included fake card data that was similar to that often left accidentally on the Internet by merchants. Using people he trusted to call attention to the website in various chat rooms known to be populated by credit card thieves, he waited and watched as thieves began linking to the site (in the process he captured their IP address). In some cases Clements was able to identify the city in which the thief was operating using software created by Nami Media, Inc.