Black Market Prices for Stolen Credit Card ID’s

Your credit card information is now only worth between $0.06 and $30.00 on the black market, according to a new report by Symantec. Your bank account information will fetch between $10.00 and $1,000.00 depending on how much money you have in the account.

Personal identity theft and financial information by hackers has become so prevalent – and efficient – that stolen credit card details now sell for as little as six cents a card if you buy in bulk (5,000 ID’s at a time).  Last year those same ID’s sold for $0.55 each – so the laws of supply and demand are clearly at work here.

Black Market Prices for Credit Card Numbers

The rarity of the credit card information is often associated with the location of the issuing bank and the type of card. Information from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East is typically offered at higher prices than from the US because the supply of credit card information for these regions is rarer.  Cards from countries like Sweden or Belgium average $20 each, while cards issued from the United States were the least expensive.  The lower price range for credit cards was also due to bulk purchase discounts offered by sellers. Credit cards are typically sold in bulk, with lot sizes from as few as 10 credit cards to as many as 5,000. Common bulk amounts and rates observed by Symantec during this reporting period were 100 credit cards for $150 ($1.50 each), 140 credit cards for $120 ($0.86 each), and 5,000 credit cards for $300 ($0.06 each).

This really blows my mind – the fact that someone can purchase 5,000 credit card ID’s for $300.  Assuming that only 5 % of them were still active or had an available balance on them and the crook could charge $20 on each, the ROI would look like this:

5,000 Credit Card ID’s X  5 % hit ratio = 250 available Credit Card ID’s

250 Credit Card ID’s x $20 average fraudulent charge = $5,000

$300 investment / $4,700 net return = 16:1 ROI

Not bad – do that once a month and you make $56,400.00

Increased proficiency by criminals lets them charge a premium for cards that are harder to secure, carry a higher credit limit or come with personal details about the legitimate owner.  ”Credit card information advertised on the underground economy consists of the credit card number, address, phone number, CVV2 number (the security number on the back of the card) and PIN,” the report says.  For those cards, criminals can pay as much as $30.00, a substantial rise on the maximum the previous year of $27.60.

The goods and services available through the underground economy include bank account details. The report says these have become increasingly popular among thieves because it gives them access to all a consumer’s money, not only the maximum allowed on a credit card.  Depending on how much you have in your account, that information can be sold for $10.00 to $1,000.00.  Again, European accounts were selling at a premium compared to US based accounts because they are more rare.  

E-Mail Identity Prices

Log-in details for email accounts are also popular on the underground market. These can be used to send spam or to impersonate friends and family. Once an account has been compromised, criminals gain access to other services by having password reminders sent to the hacked account.  Surpirsingly, these fetch more than credit cards do – ranging from $0.10 to $100.00.

The global report  was compiled by monitoring nearly 250,000 online sensors and deploying more than 2.5 million decoy email accounts.

You really need to have good firewall and virus protection on your computers (all of them), guard your personal information, and get an identity theft service to protect your family.  It’s clear that the hackers are out there and most of us just blindly beleive that “it cant happen to me”.  Well, it’s clearly happening to somebody…

Related posts:

1. 131,000 U.S. Military Identities Stolen In Wisconsin, Georgia, Maine
2. Did Uncle Joe Just Steal My Credit Card Number?
3. Best Credit Card for Detecting Identity Fraud
4. How to Get the Best Credit Card Rates
5. How to Get the Lowest Credit Card Rates

Tagged as: credit card, Identity Theft

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