Busting a credit card hacker

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) 

 By Steve Hargreaves and Kathleen Johnston  @CNNMoneyTech February 5, 2014: 3:34 PM ET

In 2007, Ukrainian Maksym Yastremsky was the most prolific credit card hacker in the world. He'd stolen over 40 million cards from mostly U.S.-based retailers. He'd cost credit card companies over $11 million.

In 2008 he was arrested in Turkey after the U.S. Secret Service infiltrated his network. Here's how they did it:

Flashback to 2004, when the Secret Service -- which handles currency crimes -- got wind of a criminal ring using stolen credit cards to buy high end electronics in the Los Angeles area.

Rather than bust the ring outright, they struck a deal. The ring leader would introduce an undercover Secret Service agent to the source of his stolen credit cards under the guise that the agent was a new partner in the criminal ring. Naturally, the idea was to move up the food chain, and ultimately nab the cyber criminals at the heart of the hacking underworld.

"So what I ended up doing was communicating via instant message and I started talking to people in South East Asia," said the undercover agent, in an exclusive interview with CNN.

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As part of the ruse, the agent explained that he needed all the tools to start a new ring that used phony cards to make purchases -- the machines to make the cards, the special plastic to make them out of and, most importantly, the stolen card numbers. For those, he was connected with Yastremsky.
"He had the most recent, the largest credit card data," said the agent. "Often times I knew about the breaches before they were being reported. These people were my friends online and they were selling me their new databases as they were getting them straight from the breach."

Yastremsky worked with a variety of hackers to steal the data -- sometimes placing malware directly on the networks at major retailers. As soon as you'd swipe your card, the criminals would have your info.

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