ShadowCrew
cybercrime Website (2002-2004)
ShadowCrew was a cybercrime forum that operated under the domain name ShadowCrew.com between August 2002 and November 2004.
This screenshot was taken 11/02/2004 at 4:33AM immediately after ShadowCrew forum was infiltrated by the Secret service.
Origins
The idea of the ShadowCrew was developed in early 2002 during a series of chat sessions between Brett Johnson (GOllumfun), Seth Sanders (Kidd), and Kim Marvin Taylor (MacGayver). The ShadowCrew website also contained a number of sub-forums on the latest information on hacking tricks, social engineering, credit card fraud, virus development, scams, and phishing.
Organizational structure
ShadowCrew emerged early in 2002 from another underground site, counterfeitlibrary.com, which was run by Brett Johnson and would be followed up by carderplanet.com owned by Dmitry Golubov a.k.a. Script, a website primarily in the Russian language. The site also facilitated the sale of drugs wholesale.
During its early years, the site was hosted in Hong Kong, but shortly before CumbaJohnny (Albert Gonzalez)'s arrest, the server was in his possession somewhere in New Jersey.
Aftermath and legacy
ShadowCrew was the forerunner of today's cybercrime forums and marketplaces. The structure, marketplace, review system, and other innovations began when Shadowcrew laid the basis of today's underground forums and marketplaces.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7460425. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2002 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “ShadowCrew” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.