THE bank accounts, passwords, and credit card details of vast numbers of East Carmarthenshire residents are being routinely sold on the internet it has been revealed.

C6 Intelligence Group, completed a search on just five postcodes in the Amman and Towy Valley areas for the Guardian and uncovered a staggering 22,000 records available to buy through the "dark web" - areas of the internet used by criminals and fraudsters.

Their figures show a shocking amount of thieves targeting victims through a variety of methods, such as uncovering credit card details, email passwords, date of births and secret answers used to access confidential data.

A victim of online fraud who does not wish to be named said: “This is a huge problem for people who genuinely believe their personal information is safe.

“I suffered at the hands of computer hackers after taking my computer to a repair shop to be fixed.

“One week after my computer was returned to me thieves had accessed my bank account, and several other online accounts I hold.

“I was shocked at just how easy it is for hackers to gain access to my personal information.”

Statistics have also revealed that there are more than 400 million compromised identities on record and the figure is rising.

A spokesperson from C6 Intelligence said: “We have access to the dark web, as our founders worked for the City of London Fraud Squad.

In the last two months we’ve seen an increase of over 5000 per cent in the number of compromised identities going up for sale on the dark web daily, from, on average 13,000 a day to about 688,000.

On average nine pieces of information on each person targeted have been offered up for sale.