text-only site

The US Department of Justice has charged 11 people with the theft and sale of more than 40 million credit and debit card numbers.

They are accused of stealing the numbers by hacking into the computers of nine major US retailers

The case is the largest identity theft case ever prosecuted by the US Department of Justice.

The numbers were stored on computer servers in the US and Europe and then sold to people who used them to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars at a time from automatic teller machines.

Those charged include three US citizens, one from Estonia, three from Ukraine, two from China, and one from Belarus.