Uncovering the Market for Stolen Credit Cards

NIJ-funded researchers analyzed almost 2,000 threads from 13 easily accessible web forums and discovered a network of international cybercriminals operating in a collaborative fashion to buy and sell a range of illegal financial products, including credit cards, bank account data, CVV data from credit cards and various other forms of electronic financial data, such as eBay and PayPal accounts.

Among the findings:

• Criminals often group tens to hundreds of credit cards into “dumps” that they then sell for an average of $100.
• The dumps may contain bank account or credit card data (44.7%), CVV data from credit cards (34.9%) and various forms of electronic data, such as eBay and PayPal accounts (1.4%).
• The majority of data originated from European nations, but Canada, the US and UK were also substantially victimized depending on the type of data sold. The more data available from a country, the lower the price. Bank account data from the UK and EU, for example, sold for about $4.00, while data from the US sold for about $5.00.

Read the Michigan State University announcement

Read the full report, "Examining the Structure, Organization, and Processes of the International Market for Stolen Data"

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