The Justice Department unveiled possibly their largest indictment of credit card data hackers yesterday. Nine people from the U.S. Estonia, Ukraine, China and Belarus are being charged for allegedly stealing over 40 million credit card records from nine retailers.
They successfully stole credit card data by using 'sniffing' programs on both wireless networks and on cash registers. Once captured, the criminals would load the data onto the magnetic strip of blank credit cards and then withdraw cash from ATM's.
The issuing financial institutions of the stolen cards take large financial losses because cardholders are not responsible for fraud - they are. For example, Justice Department reports that at one Dave & Busters restaurant location the sniffing program captured roughly 5,000 cards that resulted in over $600,000 of losses to the finanical institutions that issued those cards.
The affected retailers include Sports Authority, Office Max, BJ's Wholesale Club, Marshall's, T.J. Maxx and a few others.
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