back to article Pizza delivery man cops to life in DarkMarket

A former London pizza delivery man faces a 10-year prison sentence after admitting he helped found the notorious DarkMarket forum for computer crime, several news sites reported. Renukanth Subramaniam, a 33-year-old Sri Lanka-born man from North London, pleaded guilty at Blackfriars Crown Court in London to conspiracy to …

COMMENTS

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  1. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    This is almost the worst part

    "Police said he owned three homes, but had no fixed address, crashing at friends' residences and never staying at any one place for long."

    Really, this is almost the worst part. Carding is real greasy, but I'd be pissed if my friend was crashing at my place and then I found out he owned *3* houses! Come on!

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Don't throw them in jail

    We need people like that to secure our networks... I would trust a hacker more than these morons we get in all the time who graduated from some crap online technical college and think that 'security through obscurity' is the best way to secure servers... The same people who will get rid of the hardware firewalls because the OS already has one. Or think that NATs will protect them from hackers.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      hmmm

      Or just contact a good network security company. Ask them to send someone in a technical presales capacity and explain your needs. They'll suggest solutions, and you can either implement their suggestions or not, and either through them or not, with no money spent. It's not difficult to spot the charlatans. If they won't talk to you on a technical level without you spending money, you're probably wasting your money.

    2. mike2R
      Thumb Down

      sod that

      He's a thief, lock him up. Precious few credit card scammers get caught and now you want to offer this one a job?? Credit card fraud is real crime and has real victims (such as me and anyone else in ecommerce), I want this one punished.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        @mike2r

        The victims aren't just the individuals, all customers of any bank prop up the losses caused by fraud. So, I agree, lock up fraudsters, don't give them jobs...

        1. mike2R

          @Fraser

          That's true for hacks of online banking or for card present fraud, but for card not present (ie mail order/ecommerce) the loss is born 100% by the merchant - if I ship goods on a dodgy card it is my bad, the card owner gets their money back via chargeback (the amount is stopped out of future transactions on our merchant account) and I'm out the goods unless the police recover them (I crack myself up sometimes).

          I'm not really complaining about the system - if cardholders had to take the hit then people wouldn't use cards (so goodbye ecommerce business), and if banks had to then getting a merchant account would be so hard that no small business could get one (also goodbye ecommerce business). But it does mean that I loath credit card fraudsters.

        2. Kurt 5
          Grenade

          hands on punishment

          You can bet that some of the people who had their cards stolen would like to help with the punishment. After you spend countless hours trying to undo the damage it would be nice to have a way to vent your frustration/rage in a "constructive" manner.

    3. Gerhard Mack
      FAIL

      Not worth it

      I work in the credit card industry and I can tell you that a lot of thefts happen because shopkeepers and processors can't be bothered to implement even basic security.

      Not to mention the fact that a lot of cards that ended up on that site were from corrupt employees making copies of the magnetic strips while unsuspecting customers payed for their food/clothing etc.

      I really hate the stereotype of the genius hacker. These days most hacks are brain-dead easy and most security problems are the result of lazy admins or webmasters who don't bother to keep up with security updates or worse yet a company bureaucracy that prevents updates from happening.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Well he could charge rent on the other three

    makes sense, and crashing at other people's is great, keeps the food bill down, normally there is a fridge full of goodies, and if there isn't onto the next crash pad.

    A sort of nomadic existence, all Gypsy and UK Bedouin style.

  4. heyrick Silver badge

    It was where?

    "The website, it turned out, had been secretly run from an FBI facility in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania."

    Pwned!

  5. sabba
    Pirate

    Damn

    Damn, so that's why my pizza never arrived, and cost me £32500!!

  6. Andy Enderby 1

    employ them ?

    They're tainted, and as last years news regarding a swatter reveals, even under the supervision of a handler, there's a good chance they'll try to get away with further crime. They should serve their sentence and be barred from access to computers during their imprisonment and for whatever period the judge sees fit afterwards.

    As an aside, after a succession of lame computer hacker movies, featuring smart young things flailing at keyboards to the strains of a techno sound track, how about negotiating movie rights on this, rather more realistic scenario ?

  7. ElReg!comments!Pierre

    Yay Feds (not)

    Remember that the whole operation was a FBI sting. A 3-years sting that allowed thousands of credit card fraudster defraud (at least, only at submission time) hundreds of thousands unsuspecting punters. For what? 2 convictions? Yay. If I was one of the victims, I would really be pissed at the Feds right now.

  8. JaitcH
    Happy

    It's good to know they were gentlemen

    I was pleased to read that fould language was banned in their forum. They must be gentlemen, albeit gentlemen thieves - like Members of Parliament.

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