Slilpp Marketplace has been active since 2012, and U.S. law enforcement arrested or charged so far over a dozen individuals connected to it.
The FBI, Justice Department, U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, and law enforcement agencies from Germany, the Netherlands and Romania partnered to locate and seize the servers which hosted the marketplace infrastructure and its assorted domains.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicholas L. McQuaid of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said that the marketplace allegedly has caused victims worldwide to incur losses of hundreds of millions of dollars.
An audit published last year revealed that there are at least five billion stolen credentials available in criminal forums and marketplaces across the dark web, with an average asking price around US$15. Many valuable account credentials, like active bank account logins, commanded an average price of $71, while some banking account credentials were “sold for as much as $500 depending on the funds available and the freshness of the credential theft itself.”
It’s not clear exactly how extensive the operation reached, although based on current victim reports, stolen logins transacted over Slilpp have caused over $200 million in losses in the U.S. A recently-unsealed affidavit revealed that over 1,400 companies had been represented among the credentials available for sale at the time of the operation.
