The Soprano Connection

Posted on 10 May 2007 at 09:21

The American Mafia ran the largest credit card porn site racket, which the FBI claims netted members of the Gambino family over $230 million between 1996 and 2001.

The Mafia scheme was audacious and ingenious. Their honey trap websites offered 'free tours' of porn sites before entering.

The sites asked visitors for credit card details, supposedly to prove their age. In fact, their cards were then charged up to $90 a month for non-existent subscriptions to porn sites.

It might be hard to imagine falling for such a ruse now, or not checking credit card statements afterwards to look for abuse. But, across the world, tens or hundreds of thousands of people did. Some British victims of the Gambino family internet fraud later became targets of Operation Ore.

On 9 January 2006, Gambino family capo Richard Martino and his brother Daniel were ordered to pay $6.4 million and sentenced to five years in jail without parole.

Top city banker John Adam was one of the Mafias many fraud victims. During 1998 and 1999, his family credit card was charged repeatedly by Gambino internet organisations. The stolen data was shared with other fraudsters. In June 1999, Adam's card was used twice more to pay for sites run by Arief Dharmawan, one of Landslide's top webmasters - and a child porn merchant.

Seven years later in May 2006, Adam, a pillar of society, stood aghast as police entered his home and trawled through his family's intimate possessions. He says that police officers 'sneered' when he and his lawyers told them about credit card fraud. 'They said they had never heard of it happening,' he told PC Pro. Only after a two-day High Court case last September did the police agree that Adam was above suspicion and apologise to him.

Ironically, even as the UK police launched Operation Ore in 2002 in the belief they had obtained a unique hit list of paedophiles, the FBI had closed in on the Gambino family scam.
While the successes of Operation Ore attracted publicity, the British government issued a warning that 'Subscribers to "adult sites" find that additional and unauthorised withdrawals are made against their credit cards'. The left hand of the police clearly didn't know what the right was doing.

Card and personal details weren't only obtained from sex website scams, but also from orthodox online traders. Some British victims of card fraud who later suffered from police mistakes in Operation Ore believe their troubles began after they bought bicycle parts - or even a honeymoon hotel stay - over the internet or on the phone from the US.

Hackers who broke into insecure trading sites stole vast quantities of personal credit card data to use for fake porn site sign-ups. Hidden away on Landslide's computers were 54,348 sets of stolen credit card information, including information on dozens of UK residents. The data appeared to have been stolen en masse from a Florida-based luxury goods company, in the form of Microsoft Access databases of its complete customer records. Some of the stolen cards were later used to pay for porn websites operated by Landslide. The company whose customer data was stolen, Levenger Inc of Delray Beach, Florida, has declined to comment.

Click here to continue to part five

Part 1: Fatal flaws in Operation Ore - the full story
Part 2: The secret videotape
Part 3: Carding rackets
Part 4: The Soprano Connection