Credit Card Extortion Ring Captured

Israel Police's Lahav 433 cyber-crime unit, and other Israeli national security organizations as well as Thailand's police department collaborated to take down an extortion ring that threatened not just the Leumi Card credit card company, but possibly Israel's economic stability.

Eight people were arrested, seven in Israel and the reported ringleader, who was in Thailand.

The group put together an elaborate scheme to extort millions of dollars from the credit card company. If they didn't receive the payment, they threatened to release and sell the information on 2 million active Israeli Leumi Card credit card users that they had copied and stolen from the company.

All eight were former employees of the Leumi Card credit card company.

Some of them had infiltrated into the company to be hired into key positions where they would have access to the needed data to pull off the extortion scheme.

It took two weeks From the time Leumi Card company received the threat until the police arrested the suspects. The spokesperson for Lahav 433 said it took an incredible amount of detailed work to track down the suspects over the internet.

It would have been the biggest cyber-crime ever committed in Israel.

What is not known yet is how the group actually had access to the data which should have been encrypted and restricted.