21 WeLeakInfo Users Get Arrested By UK Police For Buying Breached Personal Data
The U.K. police arrests 21 people who were the customers of a website named WeLeakInfo, which is now inoperative since the arrest. It is said that the website was set to sell personal data, that was breached/hacked from various sites. The arrest was the part of a cyber crackdown that went nationwide. The U.K. NCA (National Crime Agency) states that the suspects who bought the breached personal data used it to commit further crimes and fraudulents.
Earlier this year, the Domain of WeLeakInfo was taken hold of, grasped jointly by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Netherlands National Police Corps, the NCA, the German Bundeskriminalamt, and the Police Service of Northern Ireland. In January, when the WeLeakInfo site was taken down, two 22-year-old men were arrested on suspicion of running the domain and profiting from it. One was from the Netherlands and the other was from Northern Ireland. The arrest of 21 suspects was initiated in November and went on for five weeks and is still an ongoing investigation. This investigation included law enforcement agencies from the U.K., Europe, and the U.S.
However, the law enforcement agencies didn’t publish the names of the 21 suspects but are described as all men who are of ages from 18 years to 38 years. Of all the 21 arrested suspects, nine were charged for fraud offenses in detail, nine were detained for suspicion of violation of the U.K.’s Computer Misuse Act and the remaining three arrested are assumed to be under investigation for both offenses. NCA also stated that they discovered and took hold of about 2.07 bitcoin currency (worth $55,200) and some of the arrested men had also bought cybercrime tools like the Crypters and the RATs (Remote Access Trojans).
The WeLeakInfo website was launched in 2017 and gained a reputation that provided a search engine to its customers. This search engine lets the users access the breached/hacked/stolen data that was collected from almost 10,000 data breaches and consisted of more than 10 billion credentials either stolen or breached. These credentials include names, phone numbers, email addresses, usernames, and passwords to various online accounts. This data was stored in a database and was available to access for the search engine provided to the customers of WeLeakInfo.
The WeLeakInfo website even had various subscription plans that allowed the customers to make unlimited searches and view the results of data breaches. The subscription varied from as low as $2 a day to $70 for three months. Such low amounts of subscriptions bought more attention and also gave entry to the learning level hackers. They were able to get huge amounts of cache data (credentials) for just $2 and later used it for malicious fraud activities.
NCA’s Paul Creffield said that most of the users use similar passwords for different websites and that’s something cybercriminals rely on for opportunities of data breaches. If you like this article, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
