The Secret Service Agent who sold cybercrooks fake IDs

In addition to being a talented ID forger, Celtic was a Secret Service agent. The government calls it “Operation Open Market,” a four-year investigation resulting, so far, in four federal grand jury indictments against 55 defendants in 10 countries, facing a cumulative millennium of prison time. What many of those alleged scammers, carders, thieves, and racketeers have in common is one simple mistake: They bought their high-quality fake IDs from a sophisticated driver’s license counterfeiting factory secretly established, owned, and operated by the United States Secret Service. The Secret Service announced Operation Open Market in a press release in March of last year when the first set of indictments dropped. But the agency hasn’t publicly disclosed how it made the busts. That story is told in internal agency documents seen by WIRED, correlated with archival posts from Carder.su and court records. It’s the story of how the Secret Service, in an operation as ironic as it was bold, stole the identity of a low-ranking member of the underground in May 2007, and, with top-level Justice Department approval, used it for years afterward to produce and sell some of the best fake IDs available anywhere. Full Story: The Secret Service Agent Who Collared Cybercrooks by Selling Them Fake IDs]]>