He has plenty of luxury wristwatches, electronic devices and perfumes that make his neighbors wonder how he purchased them given that he is unemployed. Once you ask him about it, you expect him to be offended or upset, but on the contrary, Ans, 35, brags about how he buys goods online with stolen credit cards after hacking the cards’ secret information.

Al-Monitor spoke to Ans over the phone: “Each (online) shopping site has a large database for credit-card numbers. After hacking into the website, we get personal identification data and the 16 digits that are specific to each card. We use these numbers to purchase goods from other websites. For instance, I pretend to be Alex from Britain. I buy stuff online from this website and I send it via mail to Gaza,” he said.

Ans, not his real name, said that hundreds of other people take advantage of these hacking methods due to the deteriorating economic situation. He said that he knows people who are as young as 20 and own luxury cars, which they did not purchase through shopping websites. They hack into the Internet Protocol (IP) address of routers to access communications accounts and make calls to golden numbers — international toll numbers set up by hackers — for hours. They receive huge amounts of money for each minute, which is then transferred to their bank accounts. One of these young men said he recently made $20,000 and was able to restore his worn-out house.

Ans said that he always buys computers, phones, perfumes and watches from all over the world and sometimes he sells the credit-card information to ordinary citizens for $20 per card.