British Hacker Charged for Operating “The Real Deal” Dark Web Marketplace

For selling hacking tools and stolen login credentials on the dark web marketplace The Real Deal, a 34-year-old British national has been arraigned in the United States.

Daniel Kaye, aka Popopret, Bestbuy, UserL0ser, and Spdrman, has been charged with five counts of access device fraud and one count of money laundering conspiracy.

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Kaye agreed to his extradition from Cyprus to the United States in September 2022 after being indicted in April 2021.

U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan stated that while the defendant was living abroad, he “operated an illegal website that made hacking tools and login credentials available for purchase, including those for U.S. government agencies.”

British Hacker Charged for Operating “The Real Deal” Dark Web Marketplace

Court documents show that The Real Deal, until its shutdown in 2016, functioned as a market for illicit items, including stolen account logins for U.S. government computers, bank accounts, and social media platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn.

Vendors listed stolen credit card information, personal data, botnets, hacking tools, illegal drugs, and weapons for sale on the website, and buyers could give the items a rating before purchasing.

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Kaye is accused of selling access credentials to government computers across the United States. These include systems at the United States Postal Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, NASA, and the United States Navy.

British Hacker Charged for Operating “The Real Deal” Dark Web Marketplace

Kaye was previously arrested by the U.K. law enforcement authorities in February 2017, and was subsequently jailed for 32 months in January 2019 for attacking an African phone company that knocked Liberia offline in 2016.

“[Kaye] ran a botnet using a modified Mirai variant which spread via zero-day exploits,” security researcher Marcus Hutchins noted in a series of Tweets. “Some of the DDoS attacks we saw were peaking at over 1 Tbps.”

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Furthermore, the indictment accuses Kaye of conniving with one or more persons going by the name “thedarkoverlord” to sell Social Security numbers, not to mention launder the cryptocurrency proceeds of the sale through mixing services like Bitmixer.io to obscure the money trails.

“This case is an example of our persistent determination to work with our international partners to hold criminals accountable no matter how sophisticated their cyber fraud or their geographic location,” said Keri Farley, Special Agent in Charge of FBI Atlanta.