Six charged over eBay Stubhub break-in

23 July 2014
Last updated at 19:46

Six people have been charged in a scam that defrauded eBay’s Stubhub business of around $1m (£587,000).

The charges came after more than 1,600 accounts belonging to the online ticket resale service were broken into and used to make purchases without the owners’ permissions.

The attack involved a “global cybercrime ring”, according to New York County’s district attorney office.

Three other men have been arrested in London in connection with the thefts.

It is the second breach to have been disclosed by eBay this year.

However, in this latest case the firm said its servers had not been hacked.

“The arrests today relate to fraudulent transactions that were detected on existing Stubhub customer accounts in 2013,” said Stubhub spokesman Glenn Lehrman.

“These legitimate customer accounts were accessed by cybercriminals who had obtained the customers’ login and password either through data breaches of other websites and retailers, or through the use of key-loggers and/or other malware on the customer’s own PC.”

City of London Police commissioner Adrian Leppard added: “This is an important investigation, targeting cyber criminals who are believed to have defrauded Stubhub out of $1m, by hacking its United States’ customers’ accounts to fraudulently purchase and sell tickets, and then laundered their criminal profits through legitimate UK bank accounts.”

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the US Secret Service and the New York City Police Department (NYPD) were also involved in the arrests.

EBay made users change their passwords to its main online marketplace in May after revealing hackers had accessed a database containing names, encrypted passwords, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers and dates of birth.

It said at the time that it had no evidence of that attack resulting in unauthorised activity on its members’ accounts.