A 31-year-old Moldovan national has been sentenced to 42 months in prison in the U.S. for operating an illicit marketplace called E-Root Marketplace that offered for sale hundreds of thousands of compromised credentials, the Department of Justice (DoJ) announced.
“The E-Root Marketplace operated across a widely distributed network and took steps to hide the identities of its administrators, buyers, and sellers,” the DoJ said last week.
Prospective customers could also search for RDP and SSH credentials based on various filter criteria such as price, geographic location, internet service provider, and operating system.
In an attempt to hide the transaction trails, the marketplace provided an online payment system called Perfect Money, which further made it possible to convert Bitcoin to and from Perfect Money. The infrastructure associated with E-Root and Perfect Money has since been seized by law enforcement as of late 2020.
The development comes as the DoJ also said it’s recovering $2.3 million worth of cryptocurrency linked to a pig butchering romance scam that victimized at least 37 individuals across the U.S.
Such schemes seek to build trust with victims in online communications and then entice them into investing in a cryptocurrency scam under the guise of quick returns. Instead, the funds are diverted to the scammers’ wallets, leading to financial losses.
According to Web3 anti-fraud company Scam Sniffer, approximately 57,000 victims have lost about $47 million to crypto phishing scams in the month of February 2024 alone.
Source: https://thehackernews.com/
