Russia's FSB has charged 25 people and shut down a network of about 90 websites that the group allegedly operated to circulate stolen credit card data
a nod to the banking industry's Know Your Customer anti-$-laundering rules https://krebsonsecurity.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Catalin Cimpanu / @campuscodi : Per this report, Putin had a big hand in the recent FSB crackdown on carding shops http://garwarner.blogspot.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Russian carding has traveled a long arc: what began as simple credit card schemes in the '90s was taken over by organized crime in the '00s and later blurred into joint criminal and government hacker teams. Western agencies have spent years squeezing the ecosystem from outside — the DoJ's arrests of Ukrainian Carbanak members and Europol/FBI's GozNym takedown among them — while Moscow largely looked away.
This report marks the opposite move: per Catalin Cimpanu's account of the reporting, Putin personally pushed an FSB crackdown that charged 25 people and killed roughly 90 sites circulating stolen card data. A security service that historically tolerated carding now policing it is the story.
First-order effects
- The operators and customers of those ~90 sites lose their sales channels overnight, and 25 alleged participants face prosecution inside Russia rather than the extradition risk that defined earlier cases like Carbanak.
- Buyers and sellers of stolen payment card data must relocate to surviving forums — a displacement Carding Mafia users already experienced when that forum itself was breached and its ~300K member records exposed.
Second-order effects
- Displaced carders drift toward cross-border networks like the Turkish–Russian émigré crews selling tens of millions of card numbers, pushing stolen-data trade further from FSB jurisdiction.
- With Russia policing domestic carding while Western agencies arrest abroad, the remaining safe harbors shrink on both ends, raising operating costs and consolidating the trade into fewer, more professional hands.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the FSB is not eliminating Russian cybercrime but curating it — crushing independent carding while leaving state-aligned teams untouched, which would fold the underground more tightly into the state's orbit.
- A two-bloc enforcement regime emerges: US/European takedowns versus Russian internal discipline, leaving stolen-data markets to reorganize around whichever jurisdictions each bloc cannot reach.
The trend: States are shifting from tolerating domestic cybercriminal ecosystems to actively managing them, deciding which parts of the underground survive and which get prosecuted.