If you have lost your credit or debit card and you were not able to recover it from a long time, there might be a chance that your credit card details may have been sold on the Dark Web. A report says that over 23 million credit cards and debit cards were on sale on the Dark Web in the first half of 2019.
Cybersecurity firm Sixgill released its Underground financial fraud report on Thursday. This report is all about the selling of stolen financial data on the Dark Web. The research team declared that out of the 23 million cards, nearly two out of three, 15 million, were issued in the US. Uk stands in second position with more than 7 percent. The third position has been awarded to India with 3.7 percent which is equal to almost 8 lakhs stolen debit/credit cards. And the last position has been assigned to Russia with 0.0014% which is roughly equal to 316 cards.
According to the researchers, there are two factors that dragged Russia to the last position with the low number of payment cards. The first factor is “underground criminal attitudes”, most of the criminal activities have been originated from Russia itself.
The second one is “Russia’s economic position”. Economically, Russia is a very strong country. Its GDP per capita is 11,000$, a sixth of America 62,000$.
The report also reflects that the majority of the stolen cards were Visa(57%). Master card occupied second place with 29% and the third American Express cards with 12%.
The report also suggests the methods which are used by hackers to steal card data. The hackers place skimmers over the card readers on gas pumps and ATM machines to copy the swipes when a card is used for doing a payment. The second method by infecting the PC the device with malware and this malware can be used to record payment information. The stolen credit cards details can be sold on the Dark Web for as little as 5$.
