Nowadays, carding is one of the most trending types of online scams with huge cash turnover. The criminal industry of carding has been growing rapidly for last years and it is not likely to stop growing, as the electronic commerce is developing rapidly as well.
Carders are criminals or scammers, who gain access to credit card information of other people and use that information to steal money from the cards.
The first part of a typical carding scheme is obtaining the data, which is necessary to make a payment. Usually, this data is obtained through skimming, which involves scanning one’s credit card or phishing, which involves luring the information directly from the user, usually by creating fake versions of popular websites. However, the most dangerous criminals cause huge hacker attacks, which result in leaks of thousands of credit cards to the hands of scammers.
Carders use all the means of keeping their identities secret. When obtaining the data, they not only use proxies, anonymizers and VPN’s, but also hack other people’s personal computers and perform their operations with secret remote control.
The next action after the card information is obtained, is to test, whether this information is correct and the card actually works. Sometimes, there are large time gaps between the acquiring of the information by a carder and the actual theft of money, so the carders have to test, whether the card is still in use. One of the ways of protecting from carders is to set up notifications of all the transactions of the credit card, and in case there appear suspicious transactions, to change the passwords immediately and contact banks support.
After the card is tested, carders usually purchase pre-paid gift cards of large online shops, such as Amazon. They do it in order to make less noise and to increase their own secrecy, as the gift cards will not draw much attention and are harder to track. After the cards are bought, carders use them to purchase goods from these shops. The typical choice of a carder is to buy a TV or a cellphone, as these goods are valuable and rather easy to resell. The last stage of a typical carding scheme is to resell the illegally obtained goods.
Despite such scheme is complicated enough to cause some troubles to the investigators, there is even more: usually, different carders perform different kinds of the described operations and pass the responsibilities after each step. They usually do not know each other, and even if the police catches one of the members of such a criminal group, they are not able to receive any information about the other members.