On 4 April 2023, Genesis Market - one of the most dangerous marketplaces selling stolen account credentials to hackers worldwide - was shut down and its infrastructure seized. Over two million people had been listed for the sale of their identities. Genesis Market sold so-called bots (applications that infect victims’ devices through malware or account takeover attacks) to criminals, enabling them to gain access to all the data harvested by the bots, e.g. fingerprints, cookies, saved logins, and autofill form data. In addition, the criminals were provided with the means of using the stolen data.

Operation Cookie Monster was led by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Dutch National Police (Politie). It involved 17 countries as well as Europol and Eurojust.

The investigation was supported by Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) since 2019, which also coordinated the international activity with the help of the Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce (J-CAT). Eurojust actively facilitated cross-border judicial cooperation between the national authorities involved and hosted a command centre during the parallel operations in 13 countries.

In order to see whether your information was part of a Genesis Market leak, a portal developed by the Dutch Police allows you to check whether your information has been compromised.