With Christmas coming our credit cards may be in for some serious bending which is why the market for stolen credit card numbers has never been better. In fact, it's worth a whopping £3.3bn.

Symantec recently carried out a report on the Underground Economy, spending a year monitoring the sale of online credit card, stolen goods and fraud services on underground forums, the value of services for sale was £185m.

Credit card information is the most advertised category of goods and services on the underground economy, accounting for 31% of the total. Although credit card numbers sell for between 7p and £17, the average limit on those cards was around £2,800. That places the potential market value of all those advertised card numbers at £3.3bn.

The second most common service on offer by cybercrooks is financial accounts at 20%, which sell for between £7 and £700. The average value of the accounts on sale was £28,000. Other popular information up for grabs includes home addresses, email addresses, PIN numbers, dates of birth and phone numbers.

Symantec says it observed 69,130 distinct active advertisers and 44,321,095 total messages posted to underground forums. The potential value of the goods on offer by the Top 10 stood at £11m. Geographically, the US hosted the largest number of servers with 45%, followed by Europe, Middle East & Africa on 38%.

We have previously posted ways to minimise your exposure to these criminals using software such as an Antivirus, Firewall, Anti-Spyware, and a secure browser.

Via: Gizmodo