RaidForums is a platform that served as black market for stolen data. At the end of March 2022, a 21-year-old young man was arrested in Croydon in the southern suburbs of the English capital. He is suspected to be the mastermind behind RaidForums.
International cooperation to bring down RaidForums
This police action is the result of international cooperation between the British, German, Portuguese, Romanian and Swedish police, as well as the European agency Europol and the FBI and IRS, the American judicial police and tax services. Together, the various offices managed to carry out this investigation to bring down RaidForums. Diogo Santos Coelho, the 21-year-old arrested near the English capital, said he lived in London on RaidForums. It probably wasn’t a joke.
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American justice specifies that it continues the administrator of the forum. The latter is suspected of having played an active role in the sale of several data leaks in recent years. RaidForums was a platform widely used by hackers around the world. With its 750,000 members, this forum, founded in 2015, had established itself as one of the emblematic sites for resellers of stolen data. Its notoriety had grown in recent years with the increase in cyberattacks across the world. In February 2021, the medical data of 500,000 French people was notably for sale on RaidForums, after the hacking of several medical analysis laboratories.
Diogo Santos Coelho, the mastermind behind this black market
If the administrator had already declared that he could not know “if the sellers were indeed the owners of the data sold”American justice is categorical: Diogo Santos Coelho had a very active role in the sale of data on RaidForums. The indictment mentions in particular a sale relating to 2.3 million bank card data in December 2018. It was when he came to the United States in June 2018 that the American authorities managed to link to his activities in RaidForums.
A month ago, a message from another administrator announced on Telegram the arrest of Diogo Santos Coelho. The site remained online, but Internet users quickly realized that a police operation was underway. A new site has already taken over: Breach Forums. It is justly exploited “by a reputable former RaidForums user”. One several cybersecurity experts, it has the potential to become “a suitable substitute”.