HANOI: Vietnamese police have detained three young men in Hanoi for stealing information from over 48,000 bank credit profiles and selling them for over US$18,600.
Police officers in Hanoi on Thursday said that they had arrested Le Van Nguyen, Nguyen Trong Hong and Dang Quang Thanh Thanh – all 25 years old – on charges of “illegally accessing computer networks, telecommunications networks, Internet or digital devices of other persons” pursuant to Article 226a of the Penal Code.All the three are university graduates with majors in information technology and they had rented a house to live together in Cau Giay District.
In May 2014, Nguyen used the Internet to learn about information related to bank credit profiles that were sold or shared on websites for the online purchase of goods.After detecting security flaws on several websites, Nguyen hacked them and stole the card credit databases he found there.
Nguyen later logged in on two online trading websites with servers located in Hong Kong and Italy to order goods and request that the goods be delivered to his address. He then asked Hong and Thanh to join him in hacking other similar websites to steal credit profiles to sell.Nguyen and Thanh later exchanged and traded their stolen data, and asked the buyers to transfer their payments to the bank accounts of Thanh and Hong.
Under their agreement, Nguyen and Hong each enjoyed 40 percent of the total sales of the stolen data, while Thanh pocketed the remaining amount.In November 2014, Nguyen detected vulnerabilities on another website, hacked it and stole credit profiles from it.
They also set up a website to store all the data they had pinched from the hacked websites. As of their arrest, the three young men had appropriated a total of 48,113 credit card profiles, of which they had sold about 34,000 for over VND400 million ($18,600).Of the amount, Nguyen and Hong got VND150 million while Thanh received VND100 million. Police are expanding their investigation to track down others involved in the case.
