Loner key to fraudsters' website

A loner with a modest lifestyle ran a secretive website where criminals traded information from stolen credit cards causing tens of millions of pounds of losses.

Renukanth Subramaniam helped to run the virtual criminal community Dark-

Market, which was shut down by an undercover FBI officer after a two-year global investigation.

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The site featured breaking news-style updates on the latest compromised information, enabling criminals to trade credit card information and other personal details.

Intelligence gathered by the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), the FBI and the US Secret Service showed Subramaniam used the Java Bean internet cafe in Wembley as the base for his criminal activities, regularly staying there for hours at a time.

Subramaniam, 33, was remanded in custody by a judge at Blackfriars Crown Court in London at his own request yesterday after earlier pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud and five counts of furnishing false information.

In the real world he was "a very quiet man" with no previous convictions who worked in dead-end jobs. But online, as JiLsi, he was key to the website's success.

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DarkMarket was the number one English-language website for trading stolen financial information such as credit card details, police said.

It was set up in 2005 after an earlier forum was shut down

and was managed by fraudsters in the UK, US, Canada, Germany, France, Turkey and Russia. It offered criminals a secure payment system, training and an arbitration service. It even sold advertising space to fraudsters.

Retired John McHugh, another reviewer on the site, admitted

conspiracy to defraud earlier this week. The 69-year-old, of Doncaster, was an experienced credit card fraudster who went by the online name of Devilman.

It is understood the first time the two defendants met face-to-face was in the dock last summer. They will both be sentenced later.

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