Overview
- Law enforcement from Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom worked with Microsoft, which also obtained a U.S. domain seizure for RedVDS.
- Officers confiscated nearly 70 servers in a German data center that hosted the service’s core infrastructure and more than 650 virtual machines.
- Authorities say RedVDS catered to over 13,000 users by renting virtual desktops for about $24 a month using pirated Windows software.
- The service enabled mass phishing and business‑email‑compromise operations, with Microsoft estimating about $40 million in U.S. losses over seven months and naming victims including H2 Pharma and a Florida condominium association.
- No arrests have been announced, and suspects are believed to be in an unspecified Middle Eastern country as forensic analysis of customer and payment data continues.