Europol shuts down one of the world’s largest hacker forums

RaidForums has over 0.5 million members who specialize in exploiting and selling stolen credit card data and account access.

According to Europol, investigators from the US, UK, Sweden, Portugal, Romania and Germany took down the illegal forum RaidForums, confiscated its infrastructure, and arrested its administrator and two accomplice of this online “market”.

In the US, charges have also been made against the founder and main administrator of the forum. It is a 21-year-old Portuguese, arrested on January 31 in the UK and is being detained pending extradition to the US. The US Department of Justice said the suspect will be tried in a district court in the state of Virginia of this country. The US court also revoked 3 domain names related to the above forum.

A view outside the headquarters of the European Police Agency (Europol) in The Hague, Netherlands. (Photo: AP)

According to Europol, the above-mentioned “Rotation” raid operation involved investigators from the US, UK, Sweden, Portugal, Romania and the German Federal Criminal Service (BKA). The operation was prepared over a year and was coordinated by Europol’s cybercrime experts.

RaidForums was founded in 2015 and has over half a million members. This is where large-scale exchanges of credit card data, stolen bank accounts, and online account access data take place. This information has been aggregated from many years in the data bank through various cases data leak and other illegal sources.

Therefore, to be able to benefit from the activities on the forum, the moderators are required to pay a fee that increases gradually according to different membership levels. Depending on the price, users will have stronger access to the system’s data banks as well as more functionality.

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