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Hackers Track Down Banking Fraud

Posted by jamie on from the white-hatted-detectives dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Noticing some commonalities in the spam flooding their email in-boxes, a small group of hackers set out to track down who was responsible. Along the way they uncovered a trail that led them to an organized gang of criminals halfway around the world, and right back to some of the largest financial institutions in the US, and their customers, that became the gang's prey. See the SecurityFocus story for more details."

4 of 335 comments (clear)

  1. E-Mails by rf0 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Recently I've been seen a marked increase in things like this for PayPal as well as the main UK banks including LLoyds and Barclays. People are definitly getting more aggressive to get your details.

    Also the emails are getting "smarter" in that they look more like the place and making use of the old http://www.domain1.com@www.domain2.com which for a newbie can be very easily misread

    Rus

    --
    Cheap UK and US VPS
  2. to be a complete pedant... by BobTheLawyer · · Score: 5, Informative

    the 419 fraud isn't a Ponzi scam.

    A Ponzi scam is where you take money from new "investors" and use some of it to pay an apparently high return to your existing investors, grabbing the rest for yourself. Everybody's happy until (inevitably) you run out of new investors and the whole thing falls apart.

    The 419 fraud involves a promise to transfer $millions into the victim's bank account, for some trumped up and obviously rather dubious reason. At the last minute you ask the victim to pay a "transfer fee" of perhaps a few $1000. You then vanish with the "transfer fee", never to be heard of again.

    1. Re:to be a complete pedant... by Dunark · · Score: 3, Informative

      The 419 fraud involves a promise to transfer $millions into the victim's bank account, for some trumped up and obviously rather dubious reason. At the last minute you ask the victim to pay a "transfer fee" of perhaps a few $1000. You then vanish with the "transfer fee", never to be heard of again.

      The more skillful 419 scammers don't stop when they get the $1000. Once they have a sucker on the hook, they milk them for all they can get by inventing a series of ever-increasing "fees", "bribes", etc that must be paid to complete the deal. A woman who worked in a law office got scammed into shelling out about $2 million of her employer's money. The Secret Service estimates the total take (so far) for these scams at about a half billion dollars.

  3. Re:Yikes!!! I'm glad I RTFA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    This reminds me of the scam using unicode (if I remember right) in URLs, so what you think is www.PayPal.com is actually www.PayPal.com (can't tell the difference? That is the point, one of the a's isn't an "a" at all, it is another character in another language that just happens to look identical, but the ascii / unicode is very different, and of course takes you to a completely different site (though it ~looks~ like you're at www.PayPal.com the entire time)).

    Scary!