LONDON has topped the world premier league for computer fraud, Blackfriars Crown Court heard yesterday (Thursday 14), thanks to the thousands of hacker-crimes overseen by the DarkMarket website, based in Wembley.
Popular on LondonNet
In the case against Renukanth Subramaniam, the site’s founder, an investigator for the Serious Organised Crime Squad (Soca) said that DarkMarket was, “the biggest English-language forum of its kind”, a virtual home to 2,000 of the planet’s most active computer fraudsters, who are reckoned to have pilfered untold millions of pounds in the last four years.
“JiLsi [Subramaniam’s username] was one of the highest in cybercrime with what he managed to achieve setting up a forum globally. No JiLsi, no DarkMarket,” said the man from Soca.
Subramaniam, 33, and his associates set-up DarkMarket in a run-of-the-mill Wembley internet cafe called Java Bean as a safe-haven where hackers could sell-on stolen financial information, such as credit card details, in what the judge called “a Paypal for criminals”.
DarkMarket’s attraction was its internationalism. A hacker in Germany who had broken codes belonging to a US bank might not be able to do much with the haul in his own country, but could flog the info on to counterparts in the US and vice-versa.
Like eBay, DarkMarket operated a user-review scheme and was quick to weed out ‘rippers’, hackers who do steal off other hackers.
“Although the people on DarkMarket were criminals, their reputation for being honest criminals was vital,” said a prosecutor at court.
Fortunately, its system wasn’t secure enough to stop the authorities from infiltrating the site and first the FBI, then Soca managed to crack the dark recesses of DarkMarket and bring the current case to court.
Subramaniam and another DarkMarket member, John McHugh aka devilman, both pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud charges. They will be sentenced at a later date.
