Fraud ALERT! Singapore Firm Detects Massive E-Scam, Card Data Of Over 4 Lakh Indians Put On Darknet Sale

In what can be termed as an extremely worrisome news for several Indians, a massive bank fraud has been detected by a major cyber security company in Singapore. According to security firm Group-IB, debit and credit card details of over four lakh Indians have been put on sale on a darknet portal called ‘Joker’. “Over 98 per cent of records were from the biggest Indian banks. The underground market value of the database is estimated at more than $4.2 million. The source of this batch currently remains unknown,” the company said in a statement. Latest reports suggest that Group-IB had informed the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) about the sale of the payment records. Indian officials are also working on the case.

“We are studying the information and the data and will soon be issuing an advisory in this regard,” Superintendent of Police (Maharashtra Cyber) Balsing Rajput was quoted as saying by The Hindu. This is the second major upload of payment records related to Indian cardholders registered by Group-IB in the past several months.

According to the statement released by Group-IB, “the database, comprising 461,976 payment records, in particular, exposed card numbers, expiration dates, CVV/CVC codes and, in this case, some additional information such as cardholders’ full name, as well as their emails, phone numbers and addresses.”

“ Such type of data is likely to have been compromised online — with the use of phishing, malware, or JS-sniffers — while in the previous case, we dealt with card dumps (the information contained in the card magnetic stripe), which can be stolen through the compromise of offline POS terminals, for example. We have shared all the information discovered with our colleagues from CERT-In,” said Dmitry Shestakov, Head of Group-IB сybercrime research unit.

In October last year, bank details of nearly 13 lakh Indians were put up for sale on darknet. According to a Deccan Chronicle report, s Singapore-based company discovered the massive database of debit and credit cards of around 133 million Indians. The IBA Group that unearthed the database has dubbed it as India-Mix-New-01.

The entire file is available on dark web running into two volumes. What’s worst is that this breach of privacy is being sold on dark net. Each card detail is up for sale for as low as Rs 7,000. It translates into one of the most valuable database available on dark net. Underground card shop known as Joker’s Stash has been selling the payment details.