Stolen creds site WeLeakInfo busted by multinational cop op for data reselling

Two men have been arrested after Britain’s National Crime Agency and its international pals claimed the takedown of breached credentials-reselling website WeLeakInfo. In a collaboration between British, Northern Irish, German, US and Dutch police agencies WeLeakInfo was taken offline yesterday with two 22-year-olds alleged to …

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The lawyers are going to make some money

Just what was the crime here? They were providing access to data that was already available to anyone with the smarts to go digging around on the dark web ... sure, that's a dumb dumb thing that nobody ought to do but you can use a search engine like google or bing to find all sorts or things that really ought not to be accessible.

Would they have gotten away with this if, instead of charging for access, they offered it for free but served up tons of adverts and sponsored content to visitors? They would have probably made a lot more money that way and never had any legal problems.

[localzuk]

Re: The lawyers are going to make some money

S46 makes it a crime to encourage or assist in a crime. So, effectively in this case it'd be the digital equivalent of handling stolen goods.

[NoneSuch]

Convenient.

So US law applies worldwide, but US responsibility is limited to US borders.

[SuperGeek]

An Irishman and a Dutchman walked into a datacenter....

Sounds like the start of a bad joke. An Irishman and a Dutchman wanted to start a website. The Irishman said to the Dutchman..... you get the idea :)

[mark l 2]

From a law enforcement prospective seizing the server before they were arrested seems the wrong way to go about it, they may have given them time to destroy evidence on their PCs once they realised the server had been lost. Usually these things are done at the same time to avoid those exact circumstances.

But since the US were in charge of actually seizing the domain they probably just went ahead and did it without informing the other agencies first, just like bombing an Iranian military officer without letting your allies know it was happening.

[Anonymous Coward]

It future you code so that if the web server goes down then everything is erased and ransomware installed to make a little extra from the FBI when the size the PC.

Military leaders will walk around with a little transmitter in their pockets that pings the missile launch site every 10 minutes and puts the automatic launch system back on hold until it misses 6 pings.