Every single person who has bought the phishing kit claims the seller is a scammer. Krebs’s article is based entirely on the sellers description of the (imaginary) product, rather than actual observation of the phishing kit in the wild.

See the exploit.in thread for example https://temp.sh/XOWUP/STARKILLER_V6.0.1___ULTIMATE_WEAPON__B...

Krebs has access to these forums, he could’ve checked this story out in less than 3 minutes but did not.

Even if Krebs wasn’t a subject matter expert, it’s still inexcusable that he didn’t do the most basic work here. You don’t need to frequent underground runet forums to know that a journalist should be able to verify the stories he puts out.

I think it’s also particularly telling that he didn’t bother to source reasonable quality screenshots for the story, which he would have been able to do had he ever witnessed this phishing kit working.