Criminals can sell an individual’s online identity on the Dark Web for around £800, states Top10VPN’s in their most recent Dark Web price index.
A team at the site catalogued stolen ID’s, hacked accounts and personal info on the Dark Web relevant to the UK. This resulted in 10,000 plus listings on popular markets such as Wall Street Market, Dream, and Point. On these sites, criminals sell and trade items for as low as £1, facilitating a massive amount of embezzled data. Through this price index, the team was able to deduce that it would only take £820 to compile someone’s full identity details.
“Everything has a price on the Dark Web it seems”
Deliviroo, Tesco, Uber, and even Netflix accounts are sold for the low price of £5. Not to mention, dating sites such as Match.com accounts are being sold near the £1 mark.
Items for committing fraud
At the other end of the spectrum, criminals sell hacked personal finance items. Items such as credit cards sell for 10% of the total account balance. Meanwhile, sites such as Paypal fetch a higher price of £280 on average. In fact, Paypal goes for 50% of the account balance, proving they have a higher demand among criminals.
There are many items that don’t directly lead to money but they can still lead to identity fraud. Proof of identity items such as passports run around £40. The justification in this price comes from criminal desire to use a proof of identity to set up a line of credit in someone else’s name. Stealing a form of identification makes sense for someone looking to commit fraud. Even “selfies” are a popular item among those looking to commit fraud.
Non-Fraud Items
Online shopping is also used as a non-direct line to compensation. After purchasing an account to a site such as eBay for a mere £5, criminals order costly packages with the plan to intercept them upon arrival. Meanwhile, there are those who don’t care for yielding a profit at all. Some criminals purchase username and passwords to Netflix and Spotify in hopes of streaming content for free.
The list goes on; Social accounts, food delivery accounts, and dating accounts only a few of the many categories for sale on the Dark Web. The most plentiful and cheapest of which are emails.
How your emails addresses can lead to fraud
The rapid increase in hacks over the past years have flooded marketplaces with emails which the article calls “a critical aspect of an online scam”.
It is for this reason that our Dark Web scan searches for our user’s email account on these marketplaces as it yields the broadest results.
You should know if your information is being passed or sold. Once out there it is only a matter of time that a criminal will collect or find the right pieces to commit identity fraud using your information.
Protect the digital you at ScoresMatter today.