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What can a person with stolen credit card details do?

  • Buy porn?
  • Buy tons of server resources to perform an attack?

What else? I'm sure that if he buys books, shoes and bicycles or transfer funds to his account they'll eventually find and arrest him.

Peanut
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cherouvim
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    This NPR planet money podcast touches on it a bit: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/06/20/137227559/how-to-buy-a-stolen-credit-card (though it's mostly about the online market for stolen cards). – therefromhere Nov 20 '11 at 04:48
  • Too many spammers - question locked. – Rory Alsop May 31 '12 at 14:03

4 Answers4

28

I'm not an expert at using stolen credit cards... but from what I know:

  • You could resell the numbers on the black market.
  • You could buy stuff and have it shipped to a rube who reships it to you.
  • You could "quickswap" on eBay. (Use the credit card to purchase an item that is shipped directly to the auction winner, and you pocket the money from the auction sale.)
  • Buy prepaid cards / gift certificates.
  • And probably many others.

It's basically money laundering, so many of the strategies that would apply to other forms of money laundering would apply here.

bstpierre
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  • How is option 3 not obvious and easy to catch? Surely the person earning from the auction sale would be prime suspect no? – Pacerier Jun 12 '13 at 09:15
13

Basically, someone stealing CC numbers will need to find a way to monetize them. This can be done for instance by printing fake cards with the stolen info, using them to buy goods and then sell those goods again. For someone who only wants to do the hacking part (not the real-life monetizing part that includes shopping), selling the stolen CC no's to people who do that second part is a good way to make money.

I'm sure there are many more options to monetize CC numbers. Since they're a widely accepted payment method, you can be quite creative with them :-)

chris
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    Card blanks are available, authentic looking down to the hologram and the mag stripe. They are especially useful for stolen debit card credentials. One tactic for money retrieval used a flashmob of people making a small purchase with a cashback, whereupon they passed a percentage of the money back to the middleman who distributed the cards for the counterfeiter. – Fiasco Labs May 05 '12 at 15:57
12

Here's an example of a scam to pull money from stolen credit cards by gambling online:

  1. Obtain 10,000 credit card #s.

  2. Sign up for online gambling accounts using these cards, attempting to charge $100 to gamble with. Let's say 10% actually work - now you have 1,000 accounts and $100,000 to gamble with.

  3. Play these accounts, losing to a select few accounts. Now you've got a small number of accounts with a lot of $$. Play with these accounts, eventually losing to a real account. Cash out $100,000 from the real account.

Online gambling sites have various ways to prevent this sort of behavior, but you get the idea.

Scott Pack
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JeffL
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  • They have hourly updated blacklist of creditcards, require ID / pass of players that pass thier security level (transfers/period). BUT There are always smaller, not so scrupulous, online gambling firms that don't care. – Independent Nov 21 '11 at 18:24
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you can use it to buy whatever you want, especially most hackers who would obtain a cc or however it was obtained would probably resell it on the black market, which will in turn e bought by other users, who can use it to purchase items on ebay or any auction site that accepts credit cards. basically the entire Web creates an opportunity for anyone with one to make his/her day worth while, simply Google-ing the question "what is the use of stolen credit card details?" and it will pop out so many forums and blogs talking on the issue...There are many sites which talks about this such as NPR...

Charming Prince
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