Dr Smurf pleads guilty to hacking and stealing credit card details

A hacker who went by the online moniker of “Dr Smurf” on the underground DarkMarket cybercrime forum has pleaded guilty to charges of identify theft.

Tadas Petrauskas, a 23-year-old Lithuanian hacker who lives in Brick, New Jersey, was caught in 2008 after selling login names and passwords for $2,000 to an undercover FBI agent, and admitted breaking into computer systems and selling stolen credit card details via the DarkMarket website.

Unfortunately for Petrauskas, DarkMarket had been secretly under the control of FBI agents since 2006, who were using it as a means to gather information on those involved in computer crime.

The FBI were able to gather evidence from “Dr Smurf”‘s email accounts, and arrested Petrauskas at JFK airport in New York, after he arrived on a flight from Belgium.

Petrauskas is scheduled to be sentenced on 30 October. Although unlikely that he will receive the maximum sentence, Petrauskas could technically face up to five years in prison for his…

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.