News broke overnight that Courvoisier (real name Grant West), a notorious dark web vendor has been sentenced to 10 years and 8 months in prison by a UK court for selling drugs and stolen PII on the now-defunct Alpha Bay marketplace. Andy Norton, Director of Threat Intelligence at Lastline commented below.
Andy Norton, Director of Threat Intelligence at Lastline:
“With the arrest of Courvoisier, we can now see the extent of his operation. 7 million usernames and passwords, 63,000 credit cards, and $2.5 million USD in Bitcoin, of which $2,000,000 still remains unaccounted for. He forged phishing emails from major brands in order to steal the personal data. This marks 3 recent successes for law enforcement in fighting cybercriminals. One of the Carbanak banking group leaders was arrested in Spain in March, and the founder of the Counter Anti-Virus service Scan4you was also recently arrested. Interestingly, Bitcoin was a common payment method in all arrests; Apparently crime does pay, but in cryptocurrencies.”
