On Tuesday, law enforcement officials in Europe and the United States announced that they had shut down and seized a massive illegal online marketplace that bought and sold access to databases containing millions of credit card numbers and other sensitive data belonging to Americans and others around the world.
In the Tourniquet operation, which was coordinated by Europol and brought together law enforcement from the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Portugal, and Romania, the suspected administrator of RaidForums and two other persons were detained.
RaidForums, which was launched in 2015, has over half a million subscribers, making it one of the largest illicit markets of its sort in the world, according to Europol. Its data comes from a range of US organizations in a number of industries, and it was gathered via breaches and other cybercrimes during the last few years.
According to the US Department of Justice, the hundreds of databases contained stolen bank routing and account information, login credentials, and Social Security numbers, in addition to credit card numbers.
The US recently secured permission from a judge to confiscate three domains that housed the RaidForums website, according to US court filings released Tuesday. Criminal accusations against Diogo Santos Coelho, 21, of Portugal, the putative creator and primary administrator of RaidForums, were also unsealed. Coelho was detained in the United Kingdom on January 31 at the request of the United States and is in detention pending extradition, according to the Justice Department.
Coelho is charged with conspiracy, access device fraud, and aggravated identity theft in a six-count indictment. It claims that Coelho has managed and functioned as the principal administrator of RaidForums for the past seven years, which he ran with the support of other website administrators.
According to the indictment, Coelho directly sold stolen data on the website in addition to producing and maintaining it. According to the indictment, he allegedly personally enabled unlawful transactions by establishing a fee-based "official intermediary" business where he assisted others in buying and selling data by confirming the sources of payment and files being sold before approving the transaction.