Stolen credit cards are great and all, but the real money-makers on the dark web these days are stolen accounts for services like PayPal and Uber. According to Trend Micro, stolen PayPal accounts with a guaranteed balance of $500 are selling for an average of $6.43 at the moment, while stolen Uber accounts sell for an average of $3.78, which is more than what stolen credit cards are selling for. These stolen Uber accounts are causing many users to experience “ghost rides,” where they’re charged for a ride that they never took because someone from across the globe purchased their stolen account and is using it to get rides.
Cybercriminals don’t care that much about your credit card number anymore. Uber, PayPal and even Netflix accounts have become much more valuable to criminals, as evidenced by the price these stolen identifiers now fetch on the so-called “deep Web,” according to security company Trend Micro. Stolen Uber account information on underground marketplaces sells for an average of $3.78 per account, while personally identifiable information (PII) was listed for $1 to $3.30 on average, oddly down from $4 per record in 2014, according to data compiled by Trend Micro for CNBC last week. (PII includes any information that can be used to commit identity fraud, like Social Security numbers or date of birth and varies in price depending on the specific information for sale.) So how could a criminal use a stolen Uber account? Those credentials can either be used to build a fuller picture of a victim for identity theft, or they can be used to charge phantom rides, experts said. A phantom ride is when a criminal sets up a fake driver account, and charges nonexistent rides to stolen accounts.
