Cybercrime Supersite 'DarkMarket' Was FBI Sting, Documents Confirm
While criminals thought it was based in Eastern Europe, the internet's top English-speaking cybercrime forum was secretly run by the FBI from this building on the banks of the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh.
Photo: John Monroe Butler/ Wired.com DarkMarket.ws, an online watering hole for thousands of identify thieves, hackers and credit card swindlers, has been secretly run by an FBI cybercrime agent for the last two years, until its voluntary shutdown earlier this month, according to documents unearthed by a German radio network.
Reports from the German national police obtained by the Südwestrundfunk, Southwest Germany public radio, blow the lid off the long running sting by revealing its role in nabbing a German credit card forger active on DarkMarket. The FBI agent is identified in the documents as J. Keith Mularski, a senior cybercrime agent based at the National Cyber Forensics Training Alliance in Pittsburgh, who ran the site under the hacker handle Master Splynter.
The NCFTA is a non-profit information sharing alliance funded by financial firms, internet companies and the federal government. It's also home to a seven-agent FBI headquarters unit called the Cyber Initiative and Resource Fusion Unit, which evidently ran the DarkMarket sting.
The FBI didn't return a phone call Monday.
Like earlier crime sites, DarkMarket allowed buyers and sellers of stolen identities and credit card data to meet and do business in an entrepreneurial, peer-reviewed environment. Products for sale ran the gamut from specialized hardware, to electronic banking logins collected from phishing attacks, stolen personal data needed to assume a consumer's identity ("full infos") and credit card magstripe swipes ("dumps), which are used to produce counterfeit cards. Vendors were encouraged to submit their goods for review before offering them for sale.
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Now I agree with taking down the fraudsters, but I do not agree with them running a place like this for 2 years. How much fraud happened BECAUSE of the fbi putting people in contact, etc. I think they should stick to infiltrating websites and gathering data.