DarkMarket "loner" soon to have many new friends

Unfortunatly for Renukanth Subramaniam, the "loner with a modest lifestyle" who helped run the secretive website where cybercriminals traded stolen credit card data, his friends will probably be fellow inmates in a Her Majesty's Prison Service institution.

Subramaniam was remanded into custody in London after earlier pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud and five counts of furnishing false information. Estimates have put a figure of tens of millions of pounds of losses due to the workings of DarkMarket.

For a full story on this, please check out this in-depth article at the Independent News and Media Limited website.

DarkMarket was shut down by the USA's FBI when an undercover agent infiltrated the website. After two years of secrecy, in 2009 the Spamhaus Project was able to reveal its roll in helping create a "cybercriminal profile" for the FBI to use. Spamhaus has worked for many years with international law enforcement agencies to help them track, arrest & indict (and in several notable cases, incarcerate) internet cybercriminals. Its been known for some time that the best, and often the only, way to keep a spammer, fraudster, cybercriminal type off the "internet streets" is to place them behind bars.

It should come as no surprise to anyone, including the cybercriminals, that there have been - and will be - many other arrests and prosecutions from this case. Also, that Spamhaus continues to work on many current law enforcement actions. When the news breaks on these it will be good news for the internet in general, and very bad news for a select criminal few. Which ones you ask? Well, we keep a list that contains their names in our The Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) database.

UPDATE: New story on Subramaniam at Wired.com with further details and a photo.