Suspected high-ranking members of one of many world’s largest on-line marketplaces for leaked knowledge have been arrested by French police.
In keeping with native media reviews, French cybercrime cops detained 4 outstanding members of the BreachForums web site.
The suspects – who’re stated to go by the net handles of Depressed, Hole, Noct, and Shiny Hunters – had been arrested earlier this week by Franche’s Cybercrime Brigade (BL2C).
A fifth suspect, a British nationwide who used the net deal with IntelBroker, was arrested in France in February based on a report by DataBreaches.web though not made public till now.
A US Division of Justice press launch, has unsealed expenses in opposition to this fifth suspect, naming him as 25-year-old Kai West.
The US, which is looking for West’s extradition, claims that between 2023 to 2025 he provided hacked knowledge on the market on 41 events, and provided to assist distribute hacked knowledge at no cost 117 occasions. The US Division of Justice claims that West and his co-conspirators sought to gather at the least two million {dollars}, and triggered sufferer loses of at the least US $25 million.
In the meantime, French authorities have accused the arrested suspects of finishing up a spree of assault on French organisations, stealing knowledge from the likes of telecoms agency SFR, the French soccer federation, and employment company France Travail.
BreachForums, which brazenly operated as a market for criminals to commerce stolen login credentials, hacking instruments, breached databases, and different unlawful providers, was seized by legislation enforcement businesses in Might final yr.
The seizure passed off simply days after a hacker provided on the market on the positioning knowledge that they claimed to have stolen from a Europol net portal.
An earlier incarnation of the BreachForums web site was seized by the authorities after the arrest of its creator and administrator, Conor Brian Fitzpatrick (also referred to as “pompompurin”).
Fitzpatrick was later linked to the leak on-line of over 200,000 BreachForums members’ private info.
Investigators are thought to imagine that the 5 males arrested in France are the identical people who took over the working of BreachForums following the arrest of Fitzpatrick.
The latest incarnation of BreachForums went offline in April 2025, after an alleged
BreachForums v2 went offline in April 2025 after saying it had fallen sufferer to a zero-day vulnerability in its discussion board software program.
