'Falling' before the culprit who hacked dozens of credit cards with a super algorithm developed by himself

But after investigating, they were extremely surprised when the culprit was a middle-aged newspaper seller named Fernando Falsetti in the town of Villa Madero in Buenos Aires.

When searching Falsetti's home, police were surprised to find a notebook with algorithms that helped the newspaper man find the CVC (verification code) numbers of dozens of credit cardholders, thereby performing fraudulent transactions.

The results of the investigation showed that, in his spare time while selling newspapers, Falsetti would bury his head in researching ways to hack credit cards. And through analyzing the card numbers and expiration dates of many credit cards issued by a bank in Argentina, he found their CVC codes.

When looking at 30 pages of written algorithms developed by Mr. Falsetti and recorded in an old notebook, even security experts were surprised at his intelligence. Therefore, they assumed that he was not merely a newspaper salesman.

Upon investigation they discovered that before selling the paper Mr. Falsetti was a computer engineer by training in systems and telecommunications. However, it is also extremely impressive for a computer engineer to develop algorithms to hack credit cards.

Mr. Falsetti is considered a genius at analyzing complex numbers to hack credit cards, but he is very "bad" at hiding illegal transactions. He used the money of the cardholders he hacked to pay for satellite TV subscriptions for his own newsstand. He thinks cardholders will not notice or call the police because the amount is too small.

However, the fact that hundreds of transactions were made by credit card holders who had never used the service and wanted to cancel the transaction, causing the satellite TV company to suspect fraud. Therefore, it was this company that filed a complaint with the police.

Mr. Falsetti also made no move to conceal his offense. He kept all transaction receipts when he used the cardholder's information to buy services for a newsstand in his home.

Currently, the police are still continuing to investigate the act of hacking dozens of credit cards of Mr. Falsetti. According to Argentinian media, Mr. Falsetti used the credit cards of the victims to spend 1 million pesos ($8,260).

Jessica Tanner

Update 10 June 2022