U.S., U.K., Vietnam Make Card Fraud Arrests

Law enforcement officials have arrested 11 people suspected in a $200 million global credit card fraud operation, according to the Serious Organized Crime Agency, a unit of the British government.

Duy Hai Truong, 23, of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, is charged with conspiracy to commit bank fraud, the FBI announced June 5. Truong allegedly defrauded financial institutions as part of a scheme in which personal identifying information relating to more than 1.1 million credit cards was stolen and resold to criminal customers worldwide, the FBI said.

Authorities in Vietnam arrested eight suspects in connection to the fraud ring, and three other arrests were made in the U.K. Those suspects have not been identified.

The group allegedly operated a website called “mattfeuter,” which facilitated more than $200 million worth of card fraud by hacking businesses to harvest and sell card data. The site had about 16,000 members, who accessed the site via a secure log in and asked for certain types of card data—with discounts for larger purchases.

Authorities are continuing to investigate the mattfeuter site, SOCA said in a release, adding Visa and MasterCard are supporting the investigation. 

“One of the world’s major facilitation networks for online card fraud has been dismantled by this operation,” said Andy Archibald, interim deputy director of the National Cyber Crime Unit for SOCA, in a release. “We and our partners, in the U.K. and abroad, continue to protect the public and legitimate businesses by targeting websites trading in stolen card data, and relentlessly pursuing those who operate and frequent them.”

The arrests come on the heels of arrests earlier this month in connection with another Web scheme that prosecutors said used stolen prepaid debit card data to steal as much as $45 million from National Bank of Ras Al-Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates and Bank of Muscat in Oman.