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The Anatomy of Money-Mule Scams
Brian Krebs of the Washington Post's Security Fix blog has up an article on work-at-home money mule scams (backgrounder blog post here). These operations offer victims hundreds or thousands of dollars per week for moving money through their own accounts — a critical piece of the infrastructure for profiting from identity theft and phishing. The article links to the site of a UK fraud fighter named Bob Harrison, who lists hundreds of fradulent money-mule operations.
I don't know if they get caught or if they just smell that something is fishy, but I guess they are smart and they are searching for a given profile: not too smart, not too dumb, just right....
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
I'm just a pawn in a complicated scheme to surreptitiously move money from my employers to my creditors. And there are thousands of others like me.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
That this scam can even work is a product of supplier-side economics. Where people don't have to work to get what they want. That it is all about me me me.
Get rich quick schemes never are quick and they don't get you rich. never have, never will. Grow up and get a real job. Want to make $100k a year, go to college to earn that degree for a position that does make $100k a year.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Maybe the washington post should rename his blog to: Human Fix blog
Last year I had someone send me a Money Gram money order to cash for something I was selling on craigslist. I was kinda suspicious when he asked to cash a check for more than I was selling the item for....
Now I have sold stuff online for years and can usually spot a fake immediatly...This one I had to take to a bank to confirm!
Someone had stolen a roll of blank money gram money orders and entered a valid serial number and everything. The only thing wrong was the micker ink. The numbers at the bottom of that check were standard ink, not magnetic...
I still have that check on my fridge.
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That should of course be:
Easy mistake to make, it's in Word's auto-replace list.
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
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Would Monster.com even still exist if it weren't for scams like these?
My blog
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My blog
One of my friends got such an email. He also acted innocent and started building a relationship with the scammers.
Then one day when they asked him to send in some "important" document they required, he sent them the "document" (a Hard Drive killer virus or something). He never heard from them again!!
My Blog | Badsh
2006 called. They want their news back.
This sort of operation has been going on for at the very least 2 years now. It's hardly "news". But it's stunning that there are still people who fall for that. Let's see... easy money, little to no work involved, shoving money around...
Hello? Does anyone here NOT smell a scam? I still can't decide whether those people are just insanely stupid or whether they know very well what they're doing and just claim to be stupid in case they get busted (and they usually do get busted), as a get-out-of-jail card. After all, stupidity appearantly keeps you safe from prosecution.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I bet the scammers get 'scammed' themselves occasionally.
"Hmm... FORWARD the $2,601... ooorrr..."
I've lived in Madrid for four years and have heard this story from several different people including an ex girlfriend.
A tourist looking guy with an American accent will approach people on the street with a sob story about how was robbed or otherwise lost his trekking backpack and included in the loss was his passport and wallet. His mother is sending him a Western Union Money transfer, but he can't collect it without ID. He then asks if he can call the USA with your name and passport number, have the money wired to you (his mom is always "at the Western Union right now!"). You accept and collect the money transfer at zero cost to you - fees are paid on the other end, and then turn the cash over to this guy. I've heard the sum of 275 euros up to over 800. He even offers 50 euros to reluctant people.
My ex-girlfriend fell for it, and then by coincidence bumped into the same guy two years later, so he's being doing this for a while. I didn't know her the first time she fell for it, but the second time she bumped into the guy, we both assumed it was something to do with drugs but now I'm guessing it probably had something to do with Money Mules.
Interesting that they actually use intermediates on the other end at least some of the time.
Also, The Money Mules would be a great name for an 90's cover band.
Absolutly I accept other forms than cash. Craigslist is only really effective because it is all over the US for free...I have only done one local deal and it WAS cash. Requiering cash for non-local deals is a good way to not sell anything.
My Experience
I have found Paypal to be very good so long as you send to a confirmed address and get tracking. I have had several people try and argue it but once I send Paypal the tracking number the dispute goes away in my favor.
Personal checks are riskier but I still haven't had that much of a problem. I always deposit them first and only ship once it has cleared. In over 1,000 check/money order transactions I have only had one bad check. And the check was bad for lack of funds. The person paid me immediatly with a money order plus my bank fee.
Legit money orders are usually so easy to identify that I would ship "at risk" before depositing them. I have run across 4 people trying to pass off fake money orders and never lost anything to them.
The grandparent is note worthy only because it was actually convincing in all but one detail.
I have had well over 20,000 online transactions and by following the rules above I have had about 30 problems and never lost money on any of them.
The moral of the story is:
Online business is safe and effective for everyone involved so long as you don't do anything stupid like ship before confirming payment and always get tracking numbers.
This is what I get for not looking up the proper spelling before I post....
For those who are interested MICR ink is raised, has very crisp edges and will not bleed through the paper.
If you have any concerns, look for those features. If all else fails, take it to a bank and ask them to run it through their MICR reader before depositing it.
A first-class law degree?
Give him the number to the US embassy. If he has really been robbed and lost his passport they'll help him out.
This is an example of an enticement scheme. There is a full taxonomy of schemes in chapter 5 of my book High-Assurance Design. The chapter can be downloaded from http://assuredbydesign.com/haa/chs/Berg_ch05.pdf.
In addition to money mules, there are also "goods" mules who help transfer fraudulently obtained goods overseas. The typical situation is: ID thief uses stolen card information to buy electronics from a "cardable" website (one which doesn't do a lot of checks on whether the person using the card is the real cardholder). The thief is based overseas, but knows that having goods shipped there might (at best) raise red flags and (at worst) lead the police right to them. So they convince some poor, greedy saps that they are helping out a small overseas company. The goods mules gets paid small sums to receive goods and then reship them.
The particulars might differ based on situation, of course. I've heard of the scammers using images taken from Google Images to convince the mules that they (the scammers) are really a highly attractive woman who just so happened to have fallen in love with them and needs their help with her struggling business. Yes, people fall for this. Partly because the scammers are good at what they do and partly because some people are just greedy idiots. They mentally block out any red flags because of the promise of money.
On one hand, the mules are really sad and pathetic. On the other hand, they get me mad because without them much of the identity theft/eBay fraud/stolen credit card purchases, wouldn't be possible (or at least would be much easier to track).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
What is really appalling to me is how Paypal and eBay are seemingly exempt from the rule of law.
If someone breaks into my house, steals my stuff, and puts it in their house, I am not allowed to just go into the thief's house and steal it back. I am required to give them the due process of law, file criminal charges, provide evidence to the prosecution, and let the jury decide.
If criminal A breaks into the house of victim B, stashes the stuff in victim C's house before moving it to their own house, victim C's landlord can't just decree that victim C has to pay back victim B for the loss.
This is exactly what paypal is doing.
Smart man to be suspicious. Not to be a pedantic jerkwad, but you mean "MICR" ink, sir.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MICR
Just a friendly a note since we are all a bunch of nerds who like to take interesting tangents
and learn new things anyway.
So you are withhelding evidence. Thanks.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Already have their own banks and accounts. Enough said.
Why on earth would anyone fall for this drivel?
Desperation, sure, but more likely stupidity based
on ignorance.
If those stupid scammers only realized how much an actual REAL money mule makes,they would shut off their computers and buy plane tickets.
I personally knew a money mule who moved money around Asia,several Pacific islands and a bit in South America.Some of her clients included Rulers and a well known ex-dictators surviving family.Her career lasted 5 years and she amassed million$ for herself. Retired,bought an ashram,all before she hit her mid thirties.
It wasn't without hazards tho.She survived an assassination attempt in a hotel in the Philippines,escaped a mugging by being armed herself and just generally by being a white American constantly flying in and out of those locales.
k,thats my story now you may continue.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
If someone breaks into my house, steals my stuff, and puts it in their house, I am not allowed to just go into the thief's house and steal it back. I am required to give them the due process of law, file criminal charges, provide evidence to the prosecution, and let the jury decide.
Ah, but if the money is deposited into a bank, the laws governing ECH transactions (Electronic Clearing House) absolutely state that fraudulent transactions can be reversed. PayPal is sort of Bank-like, so I imagine that their terms of service state that unless somebody steals access to your account, you are liable for any activity that takes place in it, including fraud, just like the banks. If it was a real bank account, it would be no different.
Certainly, if you want to fight the dispute, you can duke it out in court... Conversely, if PayPal/the Bank decides the disputer is in the wrong, they can duke it out in court too.
If criminal A breaks into the house of victim B, stashes the stuff in victim C's house before moving it to their own house, victim C's landlord can't just decree that victim C has to pay back victim B for the loss.
If physical goods are involved (a "Shipping Mule"), then you, the middle-man, aren't technically for anything. The tricky part is convincing the cops/jury you are an unwitting dupe, as opposed to somebody that knew what was going on.
SirWired
But that doesn't answer anything. It just redirects the question.
Since when does Paypal get to decide who is responsible for fraud?
This gave me a good laugh on several levels. They must have been really desperate...
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I seem to remember reading about a similar scam where items are bought with stolen credit, shipped to a "mule" who then repackages them and sends them off, generally outside the U.S. These mules have no physical contact with their handlers.
I always wondered why these mules didn't either selectively ship stuff off (hey, international shipping is dodgy..) or just wait until there was enough "good" stuff on hand that they wanted and then sever ties. The same thing holds true with cash transfers -- just wait until there's a large enough sum and keep it.
It might be harder with wire transfers if they know identity infomation about you, but generally speaking you're not dealing with the kind of organized crime that might come after you, and even if you were, a clever person could set themselves up with a more-or-less fake identity up front before getting themselves recruited, thus making it almost impossible to get "caught".
Does it say that a particular jurisdiction has found them guilty of fraud? Nope. Fraud can be decided by anyone - you're confusing that with a court of law charging someone with fraud. As everyone using PayPal's service are bound by their Ts&Cs, they have every right to call fraud on anything on their network should they want to.
Posting as AC cause I don't want this to come off as bragging.
So I don't have a degree, it's kind of a humorous dramatization but technically accurate to say that "I'm a high school dropout with a GED"(*) but I have management job and make $125k, working for a very old Fortune 50 company (where you might expect that a degree would be a pre-requisite) no less
It involved a little bit of foresight/luck, I chose to specialize in Microsoft technology in the early-mid 1990s while Netware and Unix still ruled the world.
It involved a lot of hard work and the ability to consistently rise above my peers both in technical ability and professional behavior.
To be sure I've faced challenges in my carer due to my lack of degree, in each of these cases it was where a degree was an absolute requirement, in many cases today a lack of degree is a barrier to entry, also I realize it's unlikely that I'll ever get a CIO/CTO job at any large sized company. But a degree is not, and definitely should not be a requirement to get a well paying, professional job.
* I was bored in high school so I took my local states version of the GED and left high school after my Junior year (big mistake in retrospect) and then a few years later took the actual GED for national recognition. My high school refused to disenroll me because I wasn't yet 18 so I just stopped going because I was too stubborn to have one of my parents come in and disenroll.
This is a good idea and will help catch most frauds, but many people have access to a MICR check encoder. I worked for a Fortune 100 retailer and they had one in every store, and they were hardly kept under lock and key. Also, if one were an enterprising criminal, one might just buy one.
Obviously, the ultimate (and very elegant) coup de grâce would be to buy it with a fraudulent check.
This is probably recruit mail for this kind of think? (doesn't seem like usual phishing to me...) ... loking on the text, the whitespace seems a little bit too misplaced ... so some hidden ID? (hope it's not my mail in plain ;-) )
.A reliable person who can receive payment on our behalf from our customers in the europan union ,it will be made payable to your name so all you need do is to take the payment of cashiers check to your bank,get it cashed and then deduct your seven percent and send the balance to our company's account officer here in the USA or as later instructed.
And
Good Day,
Would you love to work online and earn good money without affecting your present job if you have one?,our company Lacrosse Furnishers here in USA is in need of a cashing officer in the European union
If you meet these conditions please contact us by replying to
the e-mail address below with the following information.
Full Name.
Full Address(not P.O. box).
City,State,Zip Code.
Phone Number (S).
Age.
Occupation.
Reply to lacrossfurniture@gmail.com
Thanks
Steve Cooper
Lacrosse Furnisher USA
It is good advice to grow up and get real, there's no getting rich quick... but go to college for a job to make 100k/yr? That's rich? How much do you spend for a degree that will let you make 100k/yr? How many slashdot readers have college degrees that made them rich? Please speak up.
The truth is, and the evidence bears this out, you want to be rich, get the entrepreneurial spirit and strike out on your own in a legitimate business that requires your hard work and insight. Few people get rich working for other people versus starting your own business and succeeding. It isn't a quick process though, it takes years, but once the business is established, it does get easier.
My most successful friends mostly don't have college degrees. What they do have is a desire* to succeed, a belief that they can succeed, and a willingness to work for it. In my own experience, college teachers are people who've never had to cut it in the real world, what are they going to teach you that you can't learn in a book on your own time? If you get access to great teachers at a great school, that's one thing, but for most people, the local state university is going to turn them into slightly higher paid wage slaves at best.
*Note: desire is not the same as having some daydream of being rich.
...were standard ink, not magnetic...I still have that check on my fridge.
Now wait a second...If the ink's not magnetic, how does it...oh...ok...nevermind.
What?
Remember, a check/money order is not currency.
Banks are requiered to confiscate counterfeit currency and are the only non-federal government organizations that can hold counterfeit money without risking prosecution.
However a check is not subject to such restrictions. Once you try to deposite the check it becomes the property of the bank and they will deliver it to the FBI or whoever. But there is no crime in mearly HOLDING a bad check, only exercising it.
I never tried to cash the check (since I would have been cahrged $30+) I only asked them to confirm the money order was legit...which they could not.
I called up Money Gram and told them about the bad check and they told me to destroy it if I wanted to....I decided to keep it as a reminder.
Actually, the bank never asked for it and money gram told me I could keep it if I wanted after I offered to send it to them.
Trust me, it's much better being a drug mule.
It is much easier and less painful to swallow some balloons of coke or smack than to shove that bank-drive-thru cylinder in my rectum.
Ouch.
Yes, I feel sorry for the people caught in the middle of this - and especially for the EBay buyers who don't know how to check out a potential seller, and get pinched. I was screwed over on ebay once, though from a seller with relatively high feedback who seemed to turn bad (though I did end up getting my item, with assistance from some friends in the local police detective bureau ;) ).
But realistically... if people are so stupid to fall for this, don't they deserve it? I don't see it as being any different from walking down the street and a man in a dark alley asks you to drive this car to a user car dealer, when you sell it you get to keep 10%. Most people are supposed to find something fishy about that.
The bottom line is that the solution lies in education of the Internet citizenry. If people aren't smart enough to figure out what's kosher and what isn't (like doing a Google search for the company and seeing more than one almost identical web site with different contact information, or even better pulling WhoIs data) then there's a serious problem in security education. Moreover, I wonder how many people, who gave away PayPal information, would give their ATM PIN code to someone they've never met?
This being said, I went to high school with a kid - not the sharpest tool in the shed - who got an email a few years ago stating that if he deposited $5,000 in this offshore account, a month later they'd pay him $8,000. He did it - used almost all of his savings. He waited the month. He tried to contact them. Only two months later did he walk into the police department and tell them that he gave all of his money to a man from Nigeria who promised to give him more back, but he never got anything...
I don't feel all that sorry for the people who fall for these scams. The cons are preying on their greed, and all it takes is a little common sense to realize if you have no special qualifications, nobody is just going to email you out of the blue and hand you huge bundles of cash to basically do trivial tasks. The only qualifications for most of these tasks are:
These scams work because the first can be tailored to match whatever demographic the scammer is pursuing, the second is the way the scammer profits (can't extract blood from a turnip, after all), and almost everyone meets the last two qualifications.
This is most certainly NOT "money laundering", the money's not dirty or ill-gotten. It's a trick whereby a scammer makes a "sale", has the greedy victim accept the payment, and then forward the bulk of the money...but having accepted the money makes the victim criminally liable for the fraud since they become an unwitting accomplice.
It's much the same situation with a newer version of this scam I discovered on eBay a year or so ago. I bought an item at a too-good-to-be-true price, knowing it was probably a fraud...but made sure I kept myself covered. I made the payment via Paypal (to an account with a few hundred transactions and in good standing), expecting not to receive a product and then just having to file a chargeback. I received the product though, and it was everything that was advertised. I got even more suspicious when I saw who shipped it (one of the largest internet/brick & mortar retailers), and observed that their retail prices were far higher. Putting the pieces together, I alerted the mule and the retailer quickly, got my money back and halted the scam before the the scammer had managed to get any of the money. The icing on the cake was when she asked me if I wanted to be a mule too, giving me a few more details about who and where "she" was (probably another level of separation in there, but who knows...I passed along the info I was able to extract).
How that version of the scam worked was that the scammer lines up a mule, often with a good reputation and a Paypal account. The scammer sells something, directs payment to be made to the mule, and then pays for the item itself with a stolen credit card, instructing the merchant to ship the item to the "real" customer's address. The customer then receives the goods, thinks all is well, the mule's money is good and gets forwarded, and the merchant eventually loses because they chose to ship to an address that they failed to take the simplest fraud prevention action on, verifying that it is a legitimate address for the credit card used to pay for the transaction, though they theoretically could try to pin it on the customer.
The best way to avoid fraud continues to be to realize if a deal or job prospect seems too good to be true, it probably is, and to do whatever you can to verify the trustworthiness of anyone you're sending money to unless you have a way of protecting yourself. If you wouldn't just give them YOUR hard-earned money and trust them to look out for your own best interests, you shouldn't be engaging in any financial transactions with them, period.
If somebody is brain-dead enough not to recognize a scam when they see one, is such a person really going to go to Bob Williamson's site to see if the situation is listed there? Conversely, if someone is not brain-dead, do they really need a list of money-mule scams? Aren't they easily recognizable??
The last person I heard of in the same situation as you was arrested, jailed, and spent $14,000 defending himself. If you're at all uncertain about the legitimacy of a check, make sure you explain it to the bank before you ask them to verify it or cash it.
It is not micker, but rather MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition).
I worked with MICR equipment for several years, and it is a surprise that the ink is not magnetized. Several years ago, we found that laser ink will not be magnetized, and we did flagging of the cheque as a fraud suspect based on that fact (OCR will read a line, but MICR will not). Then recently we started seeing that laser ink is now magnetized and that method for fraud detection is no longer valid. I think inkjet was also magnetized.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
... absolute idiots who think that money grows on trees and don't know that when something seems to good to be true it usually is ...
Actually, (US) money DOES grow on trees - under the bark - and on cotton plants. But it has to be processed through the US mint and the Federal Reserve system.
It's not backed with anything (except the willingness of the government to accept it as tax payments and the force of government to invoke against US-based creditors who refuse to take it at face value to pay off debts). The government and (within certain rules) the Federal Reserve banks can print as much as they want - diluting the value of the existing cash, bank accounts, and other dollar-denominated assets and transferring this value to themselves.
And the whole house of cards can collapse very rapidly - "hyperinflation" - when people stop trusting it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Your ideas intrigue me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Did you reformat your resume yet?
It's not like you have anything else better to do.
hundreds or thousands of dollars?
I got a Nigerian willing to give me a 10 million commission if I can help him get 75 million dollars to the US and help him invest it.
You got to wait for the good deals people....
This might be slightly tangent but I found really funny as I am a big H.P. Lovecraft fan: http://tinyurl.com/52fy