The US on Thursday announced it has taken down Rydox, an illicit marketplace for stolen personal information and fraud tools, and unsealed charges against its alleged administrators.
Three Kosovo nationals suspected of being the administrators of the cybercrime marketplace were arrested as part of the operation, the US announced.
Ardit Kutleshi, 26, and Jetmir Kutleshi, 28, were arrested by Kosovo law enforcement and are awaiting extradition to the US. The third suspect, Shpend Sokoli, was arrested in Albania and is expected to be charged and prosecuted in the country.
According to the indictment, Rydox has been active since at least February 2016, offering for sale stolen personally identifiable information (PII), credit card information, and login credentials pertaining to thousands of victims in the US.
More than 7,600 sales of these illicit goods were made through Rydox, generating at least $230,000 in revenue, the indictment claims.
The Rydox site allegedly offered for sale at least 321,372 cybercrime products, including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, stolen credentials, credit card details, scam pages, and spamming logs and tutorials, and had over 18,000 users.
To take down the marketplace, the US obtained judicial authorization to seize the www.Rydox.cc domain – which now displays a seizure banner – and worked together with Malaysian police to seize the Rydox servers and take its website offline.
The US also obtained judicial authorization to seize approximately $225,000 from the cryptocurrency accounts controlled by Rydox’s administrators.
Ardit Kutleshi and Jetmir Kutleshi are charged with identity theft, device fraud, and money laundering and could be convicted to tens of years in prison.
On Thursday, Albania’s anti-corruption agency SPAK announced that searches performed while arresting Sokoli led to the seizure of a computer, six laptops, five mobile phones, other storage devices, documents, and cryptocurrency assets.
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