[sliverstorm]

Am I just the only one who finds it strange that people sell credit card info? I mean, that'd be like if you saw a guy on the street selling dollar bills for 1/100 cent each. Sure, they might be marked bills from the same printing run, but they are still money being sold for less than their value.

You'd think if the harvester has the ability to harvest, he'd be able to work out a better way of monetizing credit cards than selling them at $2 a pop.

Or, maybe I just misunderstand how the people who buy the lists monetize the credit card info.

[philwelch]

The problem is that there are so many people who steal mass amounts of credit cards that there's a glut of them on the market. There's really no other way for them to protect their liabilities--these guys can sell their data, vanish, and make another heist without being caught, while someone actually using the credit card faces a lot more risk.

[wmf]

I read somewhere that cybercrime is extremely specialized; there are people who collect credit card numbers, people who broker them, people who extract money from them, people who launder that money, etc.