In a coordinated global police operation, 36 websites offering credit card details of some two million people and other private information for sale for as little as two pounds have been taken down and three persons arrested, UK authorities said today.

Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) said raids in Australia, Europe, the UK and US are the culmination of two years of work.

Credit card numbers or bank account details of millions of unsuspecting victims were sold for as little as two pounds.

A 23-year-old man in Stechford, Birmingham, and a 27- year-old man in Tottenham, north London, have been arrested, along with the man in Macedonia. More arrests are expected.

Some of the websites have been under observation for two years.

During that period the details of about two-and-a-half million credit cards were recovered - preventing fraud, according to industry calculations, of at least 0.5 billion pounds.

Lee Miles, the head of SOCA's cyber crime unit, told the BBC that criminals were now selling personal data on an "industrial" scale.

"Criminals are turning over vast volumes of these cards.

We must match the criminals - it's an arms race.

"They are industrialising their processes and likewise we have to industrialise our processes to match them," Miles said.

Miles said traditional "bedroom" hackers were being recruited by criminal gangs to write the malware or "phishing" software that steals personal information.

Other IT experts are used to write the computer code that enables the websites to cope, automatically, with selling the huge amounts of data.

"I'd rather arrest 10 code writers than 1,000 front-end fraudsters," he said.

Joint operations today in Australia, the US, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Ukraine, Romania and Macedonia led to the websites being closed down.