One of common CC fraud methods is Account Takeover (ATO), where the hacker steals the victim’s identity to
get access to his bank, e-commerce sites and other types of accounts. The combination of stolen credentials
collected from credentials stuffing or credentials cracking, with the stolen credit cards, can lead to unlimited
scams. Stolen credit cards data can also be used to open new accounts using the victim’s name. Fake accounts
are commonly leveraged to conduct fraudulent transactions. According to Kaspersky, the share of ATOs in
fraudulent activities in the financial industry, increased from 34% in 2019 to 54% in 2020.
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Some CC shops are restricted or available via invite only, but most of the shops simply request a quick sign up,
so customers would have an easy and fast way to purchase the stolen credit cards. The data is mostly obtained
in two ways: through attacks on online/e-commerce platforms and users, and by a Point-of-Sale malware that
collects the CC data from payment devices.
For this report, we collected information from different CC markets and compared the data by years and
months. We collected data from 50 CC shops between 2017 and August 2021 and split the comparison to
months and years.
In the report we discuss and explore the numbers collected from Dark Web markets, to understand if the
Coronavirus has had any impact on the sale of credit cards online.
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https://www.kaspersky.com/about/press-releases/2021_share-of-account-takeover-incidents-increased-by-20-percentage-points
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