"Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) says raids in
Australia, Europe, the UK and US are the culmination of two years of work.
"Credit card numbers or bank account details of millions of
unsuspecting victims were sold for as little as £2...
"Some of the websites have been under observation for two years.
"During that period the details of about two-and-a-half million
credit cards were recovered - preventing fraud, according to industry
calculations, of at least £0.5bn.
"Lee Miles, the head of Soca's cyber crime unit, told the BBC
that criminals were now selling personal data on an "industrial"
scale.
"He said: "Criminals are
turning over vast volumes of these cards. We must match the criminals - it's an
arms race.
""They are industrialising their processes and likewise we
have to industrialise our processes to match them."
"Mr Miles said traditional "bedroom" hackers were being
recruited by criminal gangs to write the malware or "phishing"
software that steals personal information.
"Other IT experts are used to write the computer code that
enables the websites to cope, automatically, with selling the huge amounts of
data.
""I'd rather arrest 10 code writers than 1,000 front-end
fraudsters," he said.
"Joint operations on Thursday in Australia, the US, Britain,
Germany, the Netherlands, Ukraine, Romania and Macedonia led to the websites
being closed down..."
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