ShadowCrew

An early carding forum (2002–2004) with ~4,000 members trading stolen card numbers, bank logins and fake IDs.

The prototype of the underground card market, whose leading member 'CumbaJohnny' turned informant after his 2003 arrest and then ran far bigger breaches at TJX and Heartland.

ShadowCrew launched in 2002 as an English-language forum where members reviewed vendors of stolen card data, forged documents and hacking tools, with about 4,000 members at its peak. Albert Gonzalez, a moderator known as CumbaJohnny, was arrested in 2003 and became a Secret Service informant; the agency used his access to run Operation Firewall, which took the site down on 26 October 2004 with 28 arrests. Gonzalez went back to work: between 2005 and 2007 he and Russian partners took 170 million card numbers from TJX, Heartland and others, and in 2010 he got 20 years.

28 arrests in eight states and six countries; 19 indicted in New Jersey; ~1.5 million stolen card numbers recovered. Gonzalez, who had informed on the forum, was later sentenced to 20 years (March 2010) for the TJX and Heartland breaches.