Carding
The trade in stolen payment card data and the craft of turning it into goods: testing cards, choosing merchants, shipping to reshippers. An economy with its own schools, slang and reputations.
Why it matters to you
Carding pressure follows the weakest checkout in a sector rather than the biggest brand in it. If your payment flow is being discussed, the fraud arrives well before the chargebacks do.
Where we meet it
Carding boards trade technique as openly as they trade cards, because a buyer who cannot cash out stops buying. The technique threads are where you read which checkout defence is currently considered solved.
Connected terms
CVV
Card-not-present data: number, expiry, security code and usually the billing address, sold per record for online use. The bulk commodity of card fraud, priced by country, issuer and freshness.
Card dump
The magnetic-stripe data read off a payment card, sold for cloning into a physical one. Distinct from card-not-present data, priced higher, and slowly becoming a legacy good as chip and contactless spread.
Cashout
The last mile: turning stolen access, cards or balances into money the criminal keeps. Gift cards, crypto, mule accounts, reshipping, each with its own fee and its own specialists.
Drop
A money or goods mule: the recruited (sometimes unwitting) person whose bank account or address launders the proceeds. Recruited openly, in "work" channels, at scale.
Read elsewhere
Where this term stops being vocabulary
Dragnet is where you watch it happen to you
Knowing the word is the cheap half. The platform is the half where the term arrives attached to your domain, with a timestamp and the source it came from.
More from the trade
Access listing
The IAB's ad format: industry, country, revenue, access level and price. Everything except the victim's name, which is disclosed to serious buyers in private.
Bot shop
A marketplace that sells the output of one infected machine as a single unit: its cookies, saved passwords, browser fingerprint and time zone, packaged so a buyer can load the lot into an antidetect browser and resume the victim's sessions.
Cashout
The last mile: turning stolen access, cards or balances into money the criminal keeps. Gift cards, crypto, mule accounts, reshipping, each with its own fee and its own specialists.
Cloud of logs
A subscription Telegram channel that pours out fresh stealer logs daily to paying members. Bulk access to victims, sold like a streaming service.