Get Revenge on Your Enemies for Only $20!

By Pamela Mortimer

Perhaps not everyone feels that revenge is a dish best served cold. Confidential Access, a website that offers dastardly revenge services to clients and has come under fire by law enforcement agencies, is currently unavailable to the general public. It is unclear whether the British-run site was shut down or voluntarily closed due to the growing interest of numerous law enforcement agencies. As of Monday morning, the site had replaced its revenge services with RSS feeds but still offered for purchase realistic-looking fraudulent documents such as licenses, passports, bank statements, pay checks, car titles, deeds, and tax forms. Of course, the documents were advertised as "novelty" items. As of Monday afternoon, the site is not accessible at all.

The purpose of the site was to offer various levels of revenge to customers who wanted to devastate - and even destroy - their enemies. The complete "revenge package", starting at $20 a month, gave the average Joe the ability to virtually destroy the credit and reputations of those they dislike. With CA’s help, a person can make the credit ratings of enemies plummet to an all time low and even cause the victim to be suspected of fraud. One suggestion is to use false documentation to apply for credit with a large number of banks or credit card companies, an act that is detrimental to a credit score. Also offered was the ability to cause the victims' bank accounts to be closed remotely and to have all their essential utilities turned off.

As advertised on the site: "Destroy a person's bank account using our novelty bank statements. Bank accounts are like gold dust now; return[ing] a novelty bank statement with their details back to the bank works for killing someone’s [sic] credit card account."

"Watch your victim cry when all his/her accounts are closed."

The site also promises: "CA [Confidential Access] can make it so someone couldn't even get an ice cream cone on credit again."

To seal the deal, CA advises its users to "Create some false payslips [paychecks] and send them back returned to the victim's employer and watch them lose their job."

Along with financial ruin, CA promises to ruin personal relationships. One scheme is to send fake e-mails and/or text messages to the victim, allegedly from a spouse or lover, accusing him or her of infidelities or other improprieties.

The website is operated through a server in Singapore but is operated by Brits. While clients are directed to send payment over the Internet or make a deposit into a British bank account registered to "A. J. Smith", the actual owners of the site are listed as Caxess Corporation. Various law enforcement agencies’ attempts to track down the company and its owners have failed, leading to untraceable phone numbers and post office boxes attached to offshore courier companies.

In one investigation of the website, U.K.-based newspaper The Sunday Times spent $600 to obtain a fraudulent British driver’s license using a bogus name and photograph. The photograph belonged to one of the FBI's most wanted terrorists — Adam Yahiye Gadahn, aka "Azzam the American", who is an alleged Al Qaeda operative. The license features Gadahn’s picture and alias, complete with appropriate markings and a realistic-looking hologram.

The CA forum is chock full of glowing testimonies from its clients. Also present is a letter from a fraud investigator at the Royal Bank of Scotland. The letter is a request to the Singapore-based server to take down the site because it is breaching trademark law.

In response to the request, the CA's operators have posted the investigator's home address, along with the name of his partner, and suggested that subscribers send excrement through the post.

Other suggestions include deflating the man's car tires, instigating a credit inquiry on him and perhaps the worst – some suggest "paying him a visit".

The Sunday Times is protecting the identity of the man. The Royal Bank has confirmed that the investigator has received threatening phone calls.

"I have never come across a site devoted to offering revenge in this way before," said Richard Clayton, a Cambridge University researcher on Internet security and adviser to the House of Lords’ Science and Technology Committee.

"The only similar thing is one or two of the extreme right-wing Web sites which list addresses and suggest people go and beat up political opponents."