Security News > 2022 > September > Multi-million dollar credit card fraud operation uncovered
A massive operation that has reportedly siphoned millions of USD from credit cards since its launch in 2019 has been exposed and is considered responsible for losses for tens of thousands of victims.
The site operators, thought to originate from Russia, operate an extensive network of bogus dating and customer support websites and use them to charge credit cards bought on the dark web.
The operation uses two kinds of domains that serve as the basis of the operation, namely, dating sites and customer support portals.
Many of the support sites are designed with colors and logos to impersonate the brand. A big part of the operation is getting as many gray charges as possible before a consumer contacts support or their CC company," Andrew Newman, CTO and Co-Founder of ReasonLabs, told BleepingComputer.
The biggest obstacle of the operation is registering these sites as payment acquirers with processors, who typically classify them as "High risk" even when they're legitimate due to the category having high charge-back percentages.
All sites list a toll-free number for "Subscribers" if they want to cancel a payment, which is typically not found in fraudulent sites.