3 ms·

Why hacked Facebook/Gmail/Instagram/etc accounts are so expensive?

• dewey 6y ago
  One reason might be that these "legit" accounts are used to pay for ads: https://www.cnet.com/news/your-hacked-facebook-account-may-be-bankrolling-scam-ad-campaigns/ https://www.cnet.com/news/your-hacked-facebook-account-may-b...
• stevespang 6y ago
  Phone verified facebook logins (and the others) are like $5 and less . . .
• cycomanic 6y ago
  Follow up question, if they are so important why has no-one created a scheme of scamming the scammers. Just create lots of new arbitrary Gmail accounts and sell them on the dark web? How do they prevent that?
  • ndr 6y ago
    What makes you think this is not the thing on sale?
    • tripletao 6y ago
      A hacked Gmail account and an empty new account both have commercial value, but with very different applications. For the quoted price (~$150), a hacked real email account would have to be full of personal information useful for identity theft type fraud, or able be used to gain further control of other accounts that support password reset by email. An empty new account ("PVA", phone-verified account) is good only for spamming, registering fake accounts with services that require an email address, etc., with typical pricing in the tens of cents. PVAs are closer to commodities, while the pricing for a hacked real account would vary a lot with the victim (child vs. college student vs. investment banker vs. careless cryptocurrency enthusiast vs. ...). Of course nothing stops an anonymous seller from defrauding an anonymous buyer in a one-off transaction. But sellers operate under some kind of semi-stable pseudonym, so they do care about their reputations. They might also be selling on a market where some third party would look at the goods provided and adjudicate a dispute.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]