Fraudsters had access to 200,000 credit cards
24 December 2009
Two conspirators in a global credit card fraud which caused estimated bank losses of tens of millions of pounds were jailed yesterday (23 December 2009).
Gboyega Akinbola (36) and Oyetundi Oyedeji (31), both Nigerian men living in London, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud and were sentenced to three and a half years and two years in prison respectively. They are expected to be deported in due course.
The men bought compromised credit card data from a global criminal network and used it in hundreds of fraudulent transactions. To date around 200,000 compromised credit cards have been linked to this group, around 90% of them from the UK.
The crime came to light in June 2008, when an alert businessman became suspicious of activity on his company’s website. He passed his information to Surrey Police, who contacted SOCA’s e-crime team to investigate.
Trevor Pearce, Executive Director of SOCA, commented: "As a result of national and international cooperation, SOCA was able to dismantle a world-wide organised crime network dealing in huge quantities of stolen credit card data. This was an excellent operation that resulted in the biggest retrieval of compromised card data in UK law enforcement history."
The investigation led to the Beckton home of Akinbola and Oyedeji. SOCA officers searched the address and seized laptop computers, mobile phones, sim cards, and documents including bank statements. Forensic examination of the laptops revealed that this particular fraud was the tip of the iceberg.
Hundreds of attempted transactions using compromised credit cards were linked to the men’s Beckton home. Their laptops also revealed online addresses sending out data on unique credit card numbers. One had details of nearly 195,000 cards, including names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, 16 digit card numbers, 3 digit security codes, start dates and expiry dates. The controller of the address sent a global email in February 2008 boasting that he had access to over 1 million compromised credit cards and had set up a website for his services. Two more addresses offered details on over 17,000 unique credit card numbers between them.
SOCA investigators traced the online addresses and identified two men, one in Egypt and one in Vietnam, who are believed to have played a major role in selling and distributing the compromised credit card data worldwide. They have now been arrested and are under investigation by the authorities in those countries.