 | This article possibly contains original research .(August 2017) |
Type of site | Forum |
|---|---|
| Created by | Corrie |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Required to access features |
ShadowCrew was a cybercrime forum that operated under the domain name ShadowCrew.com between August 2002 and November 2004. [1]
The concept of the ShadowCrew was developed in early 2002 during a series of chat sessions between Brett Johnson (GOllumfun), Seth Sanders (Kidd), and Kim Marvin Taylor (MacGayver). The ShadowCrew website also contained a number of sub-forums on the latest information on hacking tricks, social engineering, credit card fraud, virus development, scams, and phishing. [2]
ShadowCrew emerged early in 2002 from another underground site, counterfeitlibrary.com, which was run by Brett Johnson and would be followed up by carderplanet.com owned by Dmitry Golubov a.k.a. Script, a website primarily in the Russian language. [3] The site also facilitated the sale of drugs wholesale.[ citation needed ]
During its early years, the site was hosted in Hong Kong, but shortly before CumbaJohnny (Albert Gonzalez)'s arrest, the server was in his possession somewhere in New Jersey.[ citation needed ]
ShadowCrew was the forerunner of today's cybercrime forums and marketplaces. The structure, marketplace, review system, and other innovations began when Shadowcrew laid the basis of today's underground forums and marketplaces. Likewise, many of today's current scams and computer crimes began with Counterfeitlibrary and Shadowcrew. The site flourished from the time it opened in 2002 until its demise in late October 2004. Even though the site was booming with criminal activity and all seemed well, the members did not know what was going on behind the scenes. Federal agents received their "big break" when they found CumbaJohnny aka Albert Gonzalez. [4] Upon Cumba's arrest, he immediately turned and started working with federal agents. [5] From April 2003 to October 2004, Cumba assisted in gathering information and monitoring the site and those who utilized it. [5] He started by taking out many of the Russians who were hacking databases and selling counterfeit credit cards. [5] CumbaJohnny was a long term police informant who was responsible for teaching the US Secret Service how to monitor, trap and arrest the ShadowCrew. [6]
The Federal indictment says, "Shadowcrew was an international organization of approximately 4,000 members…" The last available page before October 27, 2004 on archive.org [7] shows 2,709 registered members. To people familiar with the ShadowCrew forum, it is well known[ citation needed ] that many members had multiple user names. Members who were banned from the forum would frequently register with another user name as well. Lastly, the forum was around for over 2 years so there were possibly many inactive accounts. [8] However, there was also a need by members to develop a name that could be trusted; so it is possible that the idea that most of the registered users were duplicates isn't accurate. [9]
$4 million in losses is the believed amount dealt with through this forum. This figure was arrived at by multiplying the number of credit cards transferred by $500 each (as per federal law when no monetary figure in a fraud case can be determined). This figure assumes that every single card was valid and had been used. [10] The dollar figure quoted only pertains to the evidence gathered by the VPN employed and the members. The actual dollar figure is potentially much higher due to the fact that the $500 per card federal law wasn't in existence until after federal agents took down the site. [9]
ShadowCrew admin Brett Johnson managed to avoid being arrested following the 2004 raids, but was picked up in 2005 on separate charges, in which he then turned informant for the Secret Service. Continuing to commit tax fraud as an informant, 'Operation Anglerphish' embedded him, then dubbed by Secret Service agents as "The Original Internet Godfather", as admins on both ScandinavianCarding and CardersMarket. When his continued carding activities were exposed as a part of a separate investigation in 2006, he briefly went on the run and made the United States Most Wanted List before being caught in August of that year. [11]
In 2011, former Bulgarian ShadowCrew member Aleksi Kolarov a.k.a. APK was finally arrested and held in Paraguay before being extradited to the United States in 2013 to face charges. [12]
In 2019 CNN released an episode of Declassified: Untold Stories of American Spies detailing the Secret Service investigation into ShadowCrew.
In 2022 the Podcast Darknet Diaries made a two-part interview with GOllumfun and talked about insides from ShadowCrew. [13]
The United States Secret Service is a federal law enforcement agency under the Department of Homeland Security charged with conducting criminal investigations and protecting U.S. political leaders, their families, and visiting heads of state or government. Until 2003, the Secret Service was part of the Department of the Treasury, as the agency was founded in 1865 to combat the then-widespread counterfeiting of U.S. currency.
A cybercrime is a crime involving a computer or computer network. The computer may have been used in committing the crime, or it may be the target. Cybercrime may harm someone's security or finances.
Jonathan Joseph James was an American hacker who was the first juvenile incarcerated for cybercrime in the United States. The South Florida native was 15 years old at the time of the first offense and 16 years old on the date of his sentencing. He died at his Pinecrest, Florida home on May 18, 2008, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
DarkMarket was an English-speaking internet cybercrime forum created by Renukanth Subramaniam in London that was shut down in 2008 after FBI agent J. Keith Mularski infiltrated it using the alias Master Splyntr, leading to more than 60 arrests worldwide. Subramaniam, who used the alias JiLsi, admitted conspiracy to defraud and was sentenced to nearly five years in prison in February 2010.
Albert Gonzalez is an American computer hacker, computer criminal and police informer, who is accused of masterminding the combined credit card theft and subsequent reselling of more than 170 million card and ATM numbers from 2005 to 2007, the biggest such fraud in history. Gonzalez and his accomplices used SQL injection to deploy backdoors on several corporate systems in order to launch packet sniffing attacks which allowed him to steal computer data from internal corporate networks.
Max Ray Vision is a former computer security consultant and hacker who served a 13-year prison sentence, the longest sentence ever given at the time for hacking charges in the United States. He was convicted of two counts of wire fraud, including stealing nearly 2 million credit card numbers and running up about $86 million in fraudulent charges.
The European Cybercrime Centre is the body of the Police Office (Europol) of the European Union (EU), headquartered in The Hague, that coordinates cross-border law enforcement activities against computer crime and acts as a centre of technical expertise on the matter.
The dark web is the World Wide Web content that exists on darknets: overlay networks that use the Internet but require specific software, configurations, or authorization to access. Through the dark web, private computer networks can communicate and conduct business anonymously without divulging identifying information, such as a user's location. The dark web forms a small part of the deep web, the part of the Web not indexed by web search engines, although sometimes the term deep web is mistakenly used to refer specifically to the dark web.
Roman Valerevich Seleznev, also known by his hacker name Track2, is a Russian computer hacker. Seleznev was indicted in the United States in 2011, and was convicted of hacking into servers to steal credit-card data. His activities are estimated to have caused more than $169 million in damages to businesses and financial institutions. Seleznev was arrested on July 5, 2014, and was sentenced to 27 years in prison for wire fraud, intentional damage to a protected computer, and identity theft.
Evolution was a darknet market operating on the Tor network. The site was founded by an individual known as 'Verto' who also founded the now defunct Tor Carding Forum. Evolution was active between 14th January 2014 and mid March 2015.
TheRealDeal was a darknet website and a part of the cyber-arms industry reported to be selling code and zero-day software exploits.
A darknet market is a commercial website on the dark web that operates via darknets such as Tor and I2P. They function primarily as black markets, selling or brokering transactions involving drugs, cyber-arms, weapons, counterfeit currency, stolen credit card details, forged documents, unlicensed pharmaceuticals, steroids, and other illicit goods as well as the sale of legal products. In December 2014, a study by Gareth Owen from the University of Portsmouth suggested the second most popular sites on Tor were darknet markets.
Operation Shrouded Horizon was an 18-month international law enforcement investigation culminating in the July 2015 seizure of Darkode, an online cybercrime forum and black market, and the arrest of several of its members. The case involved law enforcement agencies from 20 countries, led by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with the assistance of Europol, in what the FBI called "the largest-ever coordinated law enforcement effort directed at an online cyber criminal forum".
The Tor Carding Forum (TCF) was a Tor-based forum specializing in the trade of stolen credit card details, identity theft and currency counterfeiting. The site was founded by an individual known as 'Verto' who also founded the now defunct Evolution darknet market.
Carder.su is a crime forum and online marketplace specialising in the sale of credit card details and identity theft.
Carding is a term describing the trafficking and unauthorized use of credit cards. The stolen credit cards or credit card numbers are then used to buy prepaid gift cards to cover up the tracks. Activities also encompass exploitation of personal data, and money laundering techniques. Modern carding sites have been described as full-service commercial entities.
A crime forum is a generic term for an Internet forum specialising in computer crime and Internet fraud activities such as hacking, identity theft, phishing, pharming, malware or spamming.
Mazafaka is a cybercrime forum with many users having moved on from sites such as ShadowCrew.
Dream Market was an online darknet market founded in late 2013. Dream Market operated on a hidden service of the Tor network, allowing online users to browse anonymously and securely while avoiding potential monitoring of traffic. The marketplace sold a variety of content, including drugs, stolen data, and counterfeit consumer goods, all using cryptocurrency. Dream provided an escrow service, with disputes handled by staff. The market also had accompanying forums, hosted on a different URL, where buyers, vendors, and other members of the community could interact.