An online marketplace selling millions of sets of stolen personal information to cyber criminals for as little as 56p per entry has been taken down in an international crackdown. The sting, led by the FBI and Dutch police and involving law enforcement agencies across 18 countries, including the UK’s National Crime Agency, took Genesis Market offline on Tuesday evening.
Users trying to access the site are now greeted with a page emblazoned with the FBI investigation name Operation Cookie Monster.
The marketplace, one of the most significant of its kind in the world, had 80 million sets of credentials available for sale, affecting two million victims.
Details including online banking, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal and Netflix account information were up for sale alongside so-called digital fingerprints containing data from victims’ devices.
This enabled criminals to bypass online security checks by pretending to be the victim.
Investigators from the National Crime Agency carried out a series of raids on Tuesday and arrested 19 suspected British users of the site.
Globally about 120 people were arrested and more than 200 searches carried out.
The NCA estimates there were hundreds of users of the site in the UK, and that tens of thousands of British victims have been targeted.
Will Lyne, head of cyber intelligence for the NCA, said: “Genesis Market is one of the top criminal access marketplaces anywhere in the world.
“Genesis Market is an enormous enabler of fraud and a range of other criminal activity online by facilitating that initial access to victims, which is a critical part of the business model in a whole range of nefarious activity.”
The marketplace could be found using normal internet search engines, as well as on the dark web, and users were offered step-by-step guides on how to buy stolen details as well as how to use them for fraud.
Rob Jones, director-general of the National Economic Crime Centre, said it was “very, very easy” for anyone to access Genesis Market to commit crime.
He added: “This is the problem for us in the online world – you don’t need to know a criminal to start. So you can completely self-start and go looking for this and get everything you need to perpetrate a crime.”
Businesses, as well as individuals, had their information sold on Genesis Market, which facilitated fraud; ransomware attacks – where hackers block access to data and demand payment to release it; sim-swapping, where mobile phone numbers are hijacked; and the theft of source code from companies.
