Thanks in part to action by the Dutch police, the American authorities have taken offline a criminal marketplace where millions of stolen login details were traded, as well as tens of thousands of credit card details and scanned passports and driver’s licenses. The alleged administrator of the WT1Shop marketplace has also been charged. This is reported by the US Department of Justice. Through WT1Shop, millions of stolen login credentials for web stores, email accounts, bank accounts, remote access solutions and PayPal accounts, 25,000 scanned driver’s licenses and passports and data from 108,000 bank accounts and nearly 22,000 credit cards were offered. The marketplace provided a forum and payment mechanism for the sale and purchase of stolen personal information via bitcoin. The Dutch police played a role in the investigation into the criminal marketplace. In June 2020, the police managed to obtain a copy of the WT1Shop database. How this database was obtained has not been disclosed. The database showed that nearly 61,000 registered users were active, including 91 providers and two administrators. At that time, 2.4 million login data for an amount of about four million dollars had been traded via the marketplace. At the end of December, it appeared that the number of users had risen to 106,000 and 94 providers were active. Together they offered about 5.9 million stolen login details. The US authorities have seized four domains of the marketplace, the server on which the website ran is now in the hands of the Portuguese authorities.
