US Law Enforcement Officers Liquidated the SSNDOB Marketplace

American law enforcement officers liquidated the SSNDOB marketplace, where they sold the personal data of approximately 24 million US residents: names, social security numbers and dates of birth.

The seizure of four domains associated with SSNDOB (ssndob.ws, ssndob.vip, ssndob.club and blackjob.biz) was the result of a joint operation by the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service and the US Department of Justice, with the support of the Cypriot police. The fact is that the trading platform consisted of several mirror sites, which previously helped attackers protect themselves from DDoS attacks and law enforcement actions.

Vitaly Kremez

Let me remind you that we also reported that Operators of the Clipminer Botnet “Earned” More Than $1.7 Million, and also that A new Kilos search engine appeared on the Darknet.

As mentioned above, the marketplace sold personal data (mostly of the US citizens), including social security numbers and dates of birth, to anyone who wanted it, accepting bitcoins as payment. According to the US Department of Justice, over the years, the sale of data has brought resource operators more than $19 million.

Experts from the information security company Advanced Intel write that most of the information on SSNDOB was obtained during leaks related to hospitals and healthcare companies. Basically, the attackers who acquired this data used it for financial fraud.

SSNDOB was one of the largest criminal marketplaces offering sets of personal data to scammers, and it played an integral role in fraudulent schemes. The majority of clients used [acquired] information for different types of fraud from taxes to bank. According to several investigations by AdvIntel, the criminals behind this marketplace specifically used databases obtained from hacks into healthcare organizations and hospitals to collect personal information for their fraudulent clients.the head of Advanced Intel Vitaly Kremez tells.

Meanwhile, Chainalysis has tracked the $22 million in bitcoin that SSNDOB operators have “earned” since April 2015. Some of these transactions were quite large ($100,000 or more), meaning some criminals were buying data in bulk.

Also, Chainalysis experts say that they have found an interesting connection between SSNDOB and Joker’s Stash card trading platform, which closed in January 2021.

Between December 2018 and June 2019, SSNDOB sent more than $100,000 worth of bitcoin to the Joker’s Stash. Probably, these marketplaces could have something to do with each other. It is possible that they were even owned by the same people.the analysts write.