Europol and FBI take hacker marketplace RaidForums offline

Europol, the FBI and other police forces have taken hacker marketplace RaidForums offline. Files with personal data were often shared on the forum, which had been collected through scraping or hacks, for example.

Europol says that the site has been taken offline and ‘infrastructure’ has been confiscated. The alleged administrator has also been arrested, as well as two accomplices. In addition to Europol and the FBI, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Portugal and Romania collaborated on the investigation, which was named Operation Tourniquet. Europol had a coordinating role in the investigation and the organizations spent a year planning the operation.

The British National Crime Agency NCA says arresting a suspected manager at his home in Croydon, London, in March. The 21-year-old man has since been released, but remains a suspect. £5,000 and “thousands of dollars” in cash were seized from his home. More than half a million dollars in crypto has been ‘frozen’.

The NCA speaks of several administrators residing in the UK and says they were responsible for processing the memberships and laundering subscription revenues. Forum members could take out a subscription for a maximum of ten euros per month, which, for example, gave them extra access to chat rooms.

Earlier this year, the United States the alleged leader of RaidForums already arrested. At the beginning of March, it already seemed that RaidForums had been taken over by the FBI, according to a Reddit post.

RaidForums was founded in 2015 and, according to the police, was one of the largest hacker forums with more than half a million users. The marketplace mainly contained major database leaks from well-known US companies, the police say, with data on millions of credit cards, bank accounts, usernames and passwords.