Authorities in the Dominican Republic have shut down a carder lab in the city of Santo Domingo, and have arrested a 62-year-old man who they say is one of the alleged leaders of the group.
Law enforcement officials had been investigating the group for several months, according to local reports, and described the group as a lab in the business of producing false credit cards, documents and IDs. A report in La Republica says that the local district attorney served the arrest warrant on a man named Adolfo Alejandro Thomas RodrÃguez.
During the arrest, authorities seized a computer, a printer designed to create new, fraudulent credit cards, as well as some USB drives, a digital camera and a cell phone. They also seized blank credit cards belonging to as many as 20 different banks.
Carding is among the more common ways for fraudsters and other criminals to get into the world of bank and credit card fraud. There are a variety of methods for budding criminals to get started in carding, and carders often are allied with other groups in the attacker ecosystem. They will sometimes serve as outlets for attackers who have stolen large numbers of credit card or debit card numbers and need a way to turn them into quick cash. Rather than simply using the numbers to buy high-ticket electronics or other goods online, which can be difficult without the CVV number, attackers will instead use carders to print the numbers on blank cards for use in real world transactions.
Turning stolen credit card and debit card numbers into actual cash can be one of the main problems for attackers, and they have tried a long list of tactics over the years to accomplish that task. Buying gift cards in bulk was a favorite for a while, and work-at-home scams to recruit money mules have been a mainstay for some time, too. But carders probably have been the most enduring link in the long chain of criminals involved in bank and credit card fraud.
