The US authorities have blocked the work of RaidForums. This is stated in the statement of the US Department of Justice, distributed on Tuesday. The site was shut down by law enforcement agencies of the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Portugal and Romania during Operation TOURNIQUET, coordinated by Europol.
The US and European authorities have blocked RaidForums, “one of the world’s largest hacker forums”, where stolen data was traded over the network, and its administrator has been charged. According to the prosecution, RaidForums was “a well-known market for cybercriminals to sell and buy data obtained by hacking.”
The US authorities have charged the founder and chief administrator of the forum, 21-year-old Diego Santos Coelho from Portugal. He was detained on January 31 in the UK at the request of the American side. The U.S. Department of Justice is seeking his extradition, after which he will appear before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Coelho is charged with six counts, including conspiracy, obtaining access to devices fraudulently and aggravated identity theft in connection with his alleged role as chief administrator of RaidForums between January 1, 2015 and January 31, 2022. At the same time, the accused and his possible accomplices, according to the investigation, developed and administered the operation of the software and computer infrastructure of the specified platform, established rules for users, and also advertised illegal RaidForums services.
The department said it had received court approval to seize three different domain names hosting the RaidForums website: raidforums.com , Rf.ws and Raid.lol.
According to the US Department of Justice, “hundreds of databases” containing stolen information were previously sold using RaidForums. The site sold stolen bank account access data, credit card information, login credentials and social security numbers.
The volume of the RaidForums market, according to the US Department of Justice, included hundreds of such data containing more than 10 billion units of personal data of individuals living in the US and other countries.
Along with illegal data trafficking, even at the time of the forum’s foundation in 2015, RaidForum acted as a platform for organizing and supporting online harassment in the form of suppressing the work of victims’ communication devices by transmitting an overwhelming data stream or the practice of falsely notifying law enforcement agencies about alleged situations that require immediate significant or even armed intervention by such authorities.