Russian Pleads Guilty to Running ‘CardPlanet’ to Sell Stolen Credit Cards

Image credit: Times of Israel.
Aleksei Burkov, a 29-year-old Russian hacker, on Thursday pleaded guilty to multiple criminal charges for running two illegal websites that helped cyber criminals commit more than $20 million in credit card fraud.

The first website Burkov operated was an online marketplace for buying and selling stolen credit card and debit card numbers—called Cardplanet—which roughly hosted 150,000 payment card details between the years 2009 and 2013.

Cardplanet marketplace offered stolen payment card details for anywhere between $2.50 and $10 a card, depending on the card type, country of origin, and the availability of card owner information.

The carding website even offered a paid service that allowed buyers to instantly verify if a stolen payment card were still valid.

“Many of the cards offered for sale belonged to U.S. citizens. The stolen credit card data from more than 150,000 compromised payment cards was allegedly sold on Burkov’s site and has resulted in over $20 million in fraudulent purchases made on U.S. credit cards,” the Department of Justice said in an old press release.

The majority of such stolen credit cards are obtained using illegal means…