Three years undercover with the identity thieves

infoworld.com

40 points·ccraigIW··6 comments

Interesting article. About ten years ago I stumbled into some IRC channels where people were trading credit card numbers, sharing information about how they operate, etc. For curiosity's sake, I hung around and chatted there for a couple of months. It was fascinating, but I was very surprised at how freely thieves were speaking / showing themselves online. It looks like little has changed.

There was some notice usually on such channels that was attempting to forbid the usage of the channel by law enforcement agents. I don't remember the wording but the strange thing was that people believed that such a notice would just work and they could freely discuss everything.

It could (theoretically) make any data gathered during that log session illegal in a court of law, depending on how it's worded.

While EULAs are on shaky legal ground, they do at least give you some form of protection that a good lawyer can use to invalidate a case on technical grounds.

Give me three cases where this defense was used successfully, 'cause I call shenanigans.

"ATM and point-of-sale skimming devices that could be hooked up to legitimate machines to steal information"

This week a friend twittered that her credit card information was stolen from a RedBox DVD dispenser. Her bank informed her about it, but they didn't say how it was accomplished. Now I know how.

another angle of this same story was submitted here a couple of weeks ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=421521

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