You think your personal information is priceless. But everything has a price, even your stolen bank account information.
McAfee Avert Labs has discovered a price list that criminals use to buy and sell credit card numbers, bank account log-ins, and other consumer data that have been filched from unsuspecting Web surfers.
"Last Friday morning in France, my investigations lead me to visit a site proposing top-quality data for a higher price than usual," writes Francois Paget of McAfee. "But when we look at this data we understand that as everywhere, you have to pay for quality."
For example, a Washington Mutual Bank account in the U.S. with an available balance of US$14,400 is priced at 600 euros (US$924), while a Citibank U.K. account with an available balance of 10,044 pounds is priced at 850 euros (US$1,310).
There is even a guarantee that if the buyer is unable to log into the account within 24 hours, maybe because the owner of the data canceled the account, the buyer can get a replacement stolen account to use.
Criminals can even buy skimmers, fake face-plates for ATM machines that steal credit card data when the card is swiped, and so-called "dump tracks" used to create fake credit cards, the McAfee blog entry says.
This follows on news earlier this week from Web security company Finjan of the discovery of a server containing stolen consumer and business data. Finjan said it found a server controlled by hackers that had more than 1.4 gigabytes of data--more than 5,000 log files--stolen from infected PCs. The stolen data included consumer and business e-mail messages, as well as health care patient data and bank customer data from individuals, financial institutions, law enforcement agencies, and other companies around the world.
This article was originally a blog post on CNET News.com.
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