DarkMarket Ringleader Pleads Guilty in London

By Kim Zetter
Threat Level
Wired.com
January 21, 2010

A former ringleader of a top internet carding site run secretly by the FBI has pleaded guilty in the United Kingdom.

Renukanth Subramaniam, aka JiLsi, was a former Pizza Hut delivery guy who helped run one of the leading English-language criminal sites, DarkMarket. The site operated as an international cyber-bazaar for more than 2,000 hackers, carders and identity thieves until it was closed in 2008.

Members of the site traded in stolen bank card and identification data.
They bought and sold specialized equipment for skimming card and PIN numbers, and for cloning data to blank cards. The activities on DarkMarket are estimated to have resulted in fraud amounting to tens of millions of dollars.

Subramaniam, a Sri Lankan–born British citizen who was arrested in 2007, pleaded guilty last week to charges of conspiracy to defraud and five counts of distributing false information. The conspiracy charge alone carries a possible 10-year prison term. Judge John Hillen warned that Subramaniam “inevitably” faces a “substantial custodial sentence.”