Slashdot Mirror
Hackers Track Down Banking Fraud
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."
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.
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!