The alleged founder and chief administrator of the notorious international cyber criminal marketplace RaidForums has been arrested in the UK, according to the FBI.
Diogo Santos Coelho, 21, of Portugal, was arrested in January it has been revealed today, following a request from the American law enforcement which is seeking to have him extradited.
According to the US, RaidForums – which operated on the open web rather than the darknet – “served as a major online marketplace for individuals to buy and sell hacked or stolen databases” containing sensitive personal and financial information.
How did they catch him?
The use of anonymising technologies can make it challenging for law enforcement to investigate cyber crime forums.
However court documents reveal that the FBI “obtained a copy of the back-end database for RaidForums” in this investigation.
This database revealed account registration information, IP address, login details and private messages between members and administrators, allowing them to pursue the site’s administrators.
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In what appears to be a separate caae, the UK’s National Crime Agency said it had arrested a “21 year-old from Croydon… at his home in March” who has since been released under investigation.
That unnamed 21-year-old is “suspected of being an administrator on the website” and officers “seized £5,000 in cash, thousands in US dollars, and put a freeze on crypto assets worth more than half a million dollars” at the time of his arrest.
