A person from Moldova has been given 42 months in prison in the US for running an illegal marketplace where hundreds of thousands of stolen login details were sold.
Court papers say Sandu Boris Diaconu, 31, made and ran E-Root Marketplace, a group of websites for selling access to hacked systems.
Diaconu was arrested in the UK in May 2021 and sent to the US in October 2023. He admitted guilt in December 2023.
E-Root Marketplace worked over a big network and let buyers look for different stolen login details, like RDP and SSH, using things like price, location, computer system, and internet provider.
The marketplace also hid the identity of admins, sellers, and buyers by using the online payment system Perfect Money.
The domain names of E-Root Marketplace were taken in 2020 along with a shady cryptocurrency exchange that let people change Bitcoin to and from Perfect Money.
The marketplace had over 350,000 stolen login details for sale, including ones from a local government agency in Tampa.
The usernames and passwords let buyers steal info from victim computers or change files on them. Lots of victims were hit in ransomware attacks, while others were part of stolen identity tax fraud schemes.
Diaconu got 42 months in prison and 36 months of supervision for “plotting to commit access device and computer fraud and having 15 or more illegal access devices.”
