Facebook is hosting cyber criminal marketplaces

Stolen goods are being traded and sold on Facebook’s dozens of cybercriminal marketplaces, according to Cisco Talos, a cyber threat security firm. It is not the first time Facebook has encountered these problems. Brian Krebs, security reporter, alerted the social media site in 2018 to multiple marketplaces that were openly offering fraud services. Talos discovered new groups that are almost identical to the marketplaces reported by Brian months earlier.

The security firm has recently tracked groups on marketplaces with a total of 385,000 members who promise to carry out ‘questionable cyber dirty deeds’. Some of these criminal services include credit card/bank information, account/login credentials and spamming tools.

Cisco Talos’s research team was surprised by how easy it was to locate the criminal online marketplaces. The research team discovered multiple posts where credit card numbers, CVV’s and even identification documents were offered. Illegal results turned up by simple search terms on Facebook, such as ‘CVV’, ‘spam’, or ‘carding’.

Facebook pages deleted

Reporting abuse regarding these groups makes Facebook take them down. However, after trying this tactic, Cisco Talos discovered that only some marketplaces were removed immediately while in other groups only specific posts were deleted. After directly seeking contact with Facebook’s security team, the majority of the criminal groups were deleted. According to Cisco Talos, these criminal marketplaces continue to emerge even after publishing their research results. This points out the existing gap between rising levels of online crime and the lack of fraud regulation.