Scammer Steals $1 Mln Worth of Bitcoin in 14 Months from Alphabay Users
A darknet phisher hiding in the pseudonym ‘Phishkingz’ has boasted that he has stolen more than $1 mln worth of the digital currency Bitcoin from phishing accounts from the darknet marketplace AlphaBay in the past 14 months as of mid-2017.
The deep web hacker said that he is also a dark market vendor and has traded around 500 Bitcoin on the LocalBitcoins site during the period.
Modus operandi
According to Phishkingz, he has decided to begin phishing AlphaBay accounts to steal Bitcoinsfollowing his discovery of a flaw on the site’s forums that allowed him to monitor new members the moment they joined the site.
He then directly contacted the members and sent them a verification process to redirect them to his link. The phisher, then, was able to get the members’ various data including their login details syncing, PGP private keys, passwords, pin codes and their mnemonic phrases.
Using Blockchain.info to save a bookmark on the members’ data, he would check for deposits every 20 minutes. He claimed that he processed the majority of the withdrawals of the deposits manually.
Expanded operations
He also said that at one point, his phishing activities have grown considerably that he employed 27 individuals to steal Bitcoins for him.
Phishkingz also claimed that he was successful in his crime due to the little support given by AlphaBay’s moderators to its users:
“The admins didn’t really care about their customers, and it only took opening a support ticket with a problem to learn this. BM (Big Muscles an AlphaBay moderator) especially is a stupid one. He would let me into accounts for 50 percent if I provided mnemonic phrase knowing I had phished the account in the first place.”
International law enforcement agents recently shuttered the AlphaBay marketplace.