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Millions of British credit card holders may have been targeted in one of the largest identity theft cases in history.
Albert Gonzalez, who once worked with the US secret service, is accused of masterminding a global scheme, working with two Russians to hack into databases of retail chains and selling the information around the world.
His indictment says the hackers stole credit card numbers from Heartland Payment Systems, a New Jersey company that processes payments from the store 7-Eleven, and supermarket chain Hannaford. Two other, unnamed, corporations were also allegedly targeted.
Millions of European cardholders are among those whose cards were compromised in the fraud, with customers of an unidentified British card issuer accounting for one in ten of the potential victims.
Gonzalez, from Miami, who is known online as "soupnazi", was charged in a New Jersey federal court on Monday.
The fraud, from October 2006 to May 2008, marks the latest and largest in at least five years of alleged criminal activity by Gonzalez. The 28-year-old is already in jail after he was charged in Boston, Massachusetts, last year, with stealing credit identities which cost the parent company of the TJ Maxx retail chain about $200million (£122million).
At the time, officials said the alleged thieves were not computer geniuses, just opportunists who used "wardriving" to cruise for accessible wireless internet signals. Once they found a vulnerable network, they installed "sniffer programs" that captured credit and debit card numbers. He called it "operation get rich or die tryin'".
Gonzalez was also charged with hacking into the computers of the Dave & Buster's restaurant chain.
His criminal activity is said to have begun when he became leader of online credit-card hacking ring, Shadowcrew. In 2004, 26 leaders of the 4,000-man ring were convicted, but Gonzalez agreed to become an informant for the Secret Service. He was later arrested over the Dave & Buster's hacking scheme in May 2008 and has been held in detention in New Jersey since.
The latest investigations led back to Gonzalez. Officials say he and his co-conspirators in Russia staged their crime on computers in New Jersey, California, Illinois, Latvia, the Netherlands and Ukraine that would infiltrate the networks of the victim companies.
They allegedly scooped up credit and debit card numbers and installed "back doors" in the victims' computer networks so they could steal more data in the future. They also installed the "sniffer" programs and are believed to have sold the card details to the other hackers.
The three were charged with computer fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Gonzalez faces up to 25 years in prison.
