According to the research conducted by Match Systems, the sale of stolen accounts from well-known platforms such as YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, Pornhub, LinkedIn, Amazon, and others poses a huge threat to both a company’s reputation and financial standing.
Most often, the buyers of such “goods” do not think much about the consequences of their actions. Let’s understand together how it works.
Currently, there are many different shady marketplaces selling goods from various big brands that can be bought for cryptocurrencies, bypassing official stores. All of them mainly operate within the perimeter of darknet marketplaces.
Here are the top 3 sites for buying stolen accounts (by 2020):
- deer.io
- lequeshop.com
- cheapdady.com
These sites are periodically “closed down” by public authorities, but this does not prevent the emergence of new “markets”.
Thus, in March 2020, one of the most popular darknet marketplaces, deer.io, was seized. By that time, it had hosted 24 thousand online stores, of which more than 250 were quite active. The turnover of account sales reached tens of millions of dollars.
Almost all marketplaces have similar assortment and prices. Let’s take the example of https://lequeshop.com/.
Top 5 most popular products
Let’s see what else you can buy on a similar darknet marketplace.
Approximate number of accounts in one of the researched marketplaces (this includes bruteforce accounts, carding accounts, auto-registration)
And here is the approximate price of such specific “goods”
2) https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4283863
Pornhub loses more than $5 million on each Darknet platform for the sale of stolen accounts.
The analysis of just two sites (and there are more than 10 of them) showed that Pornhub has already lost more than $5 million in profit.
Thus, more than 16k on https://cybersell.com.ua/ and over 20k on https://dimikey.com/ of annual Pornhub subscriptions were sold. At $140 of such a subscription on the company’s official website, the amount of lost profit for Pornhub on only two of many other similar sites in the darknet was more than $5 million! If we calculate the losses on all such sites in the Dark Web, the damage could significantly exceed $50 million!
At the same time, interest in buying such accounts on the darknet is only increasing.
For example, at the time of writing this article, only 1 position in the marketplace had 3784 sales and 688409 views.
