Cybercriminals kill for rewards

It’s now reached the point where the market has become saturated with so many credit card numbers and personal information that criminals have accumulated huge databases to share, said Alperovitch.

Furthermore, cybercriminal syndicates don’t even need to be technologically savvy. There’s now an entire industry that is providing criminals with ready and available toolkits that even a novice can pick up and operate successfully within a few hours, explained Alperovitch.

Despite the low entry cost and ease of availability for such toolkits, Alperovitch warns the biggest lure for online crime comes from the global anonymity it offers.

“What we’re starting to see and have been seeing for some years is a transnational operation all over Eastern Europe, all over South America and the Middle East, as well as Western countries that are working together exchanging stolen information and providing services to each other.

“[More so], if you’re participating in an online criminal activity there’s a pretty good possibility you won’t get caught; you won’t be identified and if you are identified you probably won’t be prosecuted because you’re probably operating out of a country where cybercrime prosecutions are non existent,” said Alperovitch.

Such was the case of the alleged cybercriminal and Ukrainian national, Dimitri Golubov. Considered a top cybercriminal boss by US authorities, he was allegedly the founder of the underground fraud ring, carderplanet.com, which launched in early 2000.

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