Police swoop on suspected credit card ring

Police have swooped on a Romanian hacking ring accused of being behind Australia's largest credit card fraud.

The gang is alleged to have stolen half a million banking details and cashed out some $30 million in goods from 30,000 credit cards.

SC first reported the theft in August when it was then thought those responsible could inflict about $25 million in damages from half a million cards.   

Sixteen alleged members of the gang were arrested in Romania by local authorities and by Australian Federal Police (AFP).

The gang is accused of stealing credit cards from 100 Australian small and medium-sized businesses.

Police allege that the gang operated by placing keylogger software on vulnerable point of sale systems and siphoning card data via the remote desktop protocol.

The same gang is also accused of using this method to steal a large cache of credit cards affecting some 80,000 customers of Subway restaurants in the United States last year.

Detective Superintendent Brad Marden told SC in August that one of the victim networks was protected with default passwords and carried both benign and unsecured transactional data.

“It’s not massive in the larger scheme of things,” he said. “By far the majority of the work that we’re involved in doesn’t involve uber-technical hackers; they are buying exploit kits and doing SQL Injection all as a result of [a victim’s] poor coding practices.”

The AFP will hold a press conference in Canberra on the arrests.

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