On March 3 and 4, 2026, law enforcement officers across eight countries executed search warrants, made arrests, and conducted interviews under a single codename: Operation Leak. The target was LeakBase, an English-language forum operating on the open web that, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, had accumulated 142,000 members and 215,000 messages by December 2025.
Anyone who visits the forum’s former address now sees a seizure banner placed there by the FBI. The message is specific: “All forum content, including users’ accounts, posts, credit details, private messages, and IP logs, has been secured and preserved for evidentiary purposes.”
The forum had been running since June 2021. It offered hacked databases carrying hundreds of millions of account credentials alongside financial records — credit and debit card numbers, bank account and routing information, usernames, and passwords. Europol, which coordinated the international side of the operation, described the platform as specializing in stealer logs: archives of credentials harvested by infostealer malware and sold for use in account takeover schemes and fraud.
A Name Behind the Handle
The forum’s administrator operated under the alias Chucky, also known across underground platforms as Chuckies and Sqlrip. Research firm KELA connected Chucky to an older alias, beakdaz, active since at least 2013. An analysis of email addresses, leaked Russian databases, phone numbers, and linked social media accounts — including a VK profile — pointed to an individual from Taganrog, Russia.
TriTrace Investigations co-founder Ilya Shumanov has since named that individual as Artem Kuchumov, a 33-year-old Russian national. Shumanov described “beakdaz” as the alias Kuchumov used when he began his “shadow career” more than a decade ago.
Other known administrators and moderators included individuals operating under the handles BloodyMery, OrderCheck, and TSR. A report published by Flare in April 2023 noted that the forum explicitly prohibited users from trading Russian databases — a policy interpreted as an attempt to avoid domestic scrutiny.
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Scope of the Crackdown
The operation reached the U.S., Australia, Belgium, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and the U.K. Europol said approximately 100 enforcement actions were carried out globally, with measures taken against 37 of the platform’s most active users.
FBI Cyber Division Assistant Director Brett Leatherman confirmed the scope: “The FBI, Europol, and law enforcement agencies from around the world executed a takedown of LeakBase, one of the largest online cybercriminal platforms, seizing users’ accounts, posts, credit details, private messages, and IP logs for evidentiary purposes.”
Weeks before the seizure, threat intelligence firm SpyCloud had reported the forum was already offline for several days, with Chucky actively seeking a new hosting provider. That search apparently continued after the takedown. Within days of Operation Leak, LeakBase reappeared at a new domain: leakbase[.]bz.
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