How the Phishing Biz Works

Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Christopher Abad has spent much of the past six months 'stalking the phisher underground,' Lee Gomes writes in the Wall Street Journal. 'The typical phisher, he discovered, isn't a movie-style villain but a Romanian teenager, albeit one who belongs to a social and economic infrastructure that is both remarkably sophisticated and utterly ragtag. If, in the early days, phishing scams were one-person operations, they have since become so complicated that, just as with medicine or law, the labor has become specialized.' For instance, a phisher in Romania who successfully scores account information for someone in the U.S. may go on IRC to seek out a 'casher' to withdraw money from the target's account, and send a cut back to the phisher."

Comments

Romanii

[alecks]

A little note to all you Romanian phishers:
Bagamiasi pula in gaturile voastre pentru denumirea tarii noastre! pupici si pumni

Re:A real person phished

[Christianfreak]

"What?" shriek the Slashbots, "If hot Brazilian chicks can't view the message HTML, traceroute the links and the redirects and WHOIS the resulting information, they shouldn't be allowed to use computers!" Perhaps, and perhaps me neither, but it doesn't surprise me that people get burned.

No, people who shouldn't be allowed to use computers are the ones who can't read and or listen. The warning has been the same: from eBay and the banks themselves, to ISPs to even the mainstream media "We will never ask for your account information by email, if someone does they are not us, DO NOT GIVE OUT YOUR ACCOUNT INFORMATION VIA E-MAIL or by sites you clicked on in a link in an email".

Its not hard, and the warning is everywhere but its like people get these emails and to smart switch goes off. I don't get it.

Re:UOPO has this class!

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Mods are definitely not reading posts today or may just have a sense of humor...