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FBI To Prosecute "Money Mules"
An anonymous reader writes "A top FBI official said today that the agency is planning a law enforcement sweep against so-called 'money mules,' individuals willingly or unwittingly roped into helping organized computer crooks launder money stolen through online banking fraud, writes Krebsonsecurity.com. The author says he has interviewed more than 150 money mules, and find most fit into one of two camps: the not-so-bright, and those who suspect something's not right, but do it anyway. From the story: 'I find most mules fit into the latter group, and you can usually tell because these individuals often will admit to having set up a new account for the job separate from where they keep their meager savings or checking. When pressed as to why they did this, if they're honest most will say they weren't sure about the whole arrangement and wanted to protect their investments just in case their employers turned out to be less-than-honest.'"
I find it funny that no-one ever reports the most interesting part of these scams. Most of the time they money they are laundering is stolen by botnets. These same botnets often send spam that includes some amount of recruitment of money mules. Some of these "work from home" scams involve people putting up posters and yard signs to recruit money mules. The entire scam is facilitated and organized by an automatic distributed computer program. It's like a huge ants nest. The workers don't really know what they're doing, but the network maintains their motivation to keep doing it. The strangest part of all is that often these systems are so resilient that they keep going long after the head has been cut off by law enforcement. Somewhere there's probably accounts bursting with money funneled there by unthinking dupes acting as part of an unconscious mechanism.
How we know is more important than what we know.
This makes sense.
A high-profile well-publicized investigation may make people more aware of the tactics that fraudsters use to recruit mules and could decrease the pool of people available purposes of laundering ill-gotten gains. It also serves the purpose of potentially scaring off mules that are very aware that they are laundering money for someone else but are nervous of being investigated by the Feds...
Why wouldn't you just keep the money? The bad guys are half a world a way and have no way to call the cops as if they would to begin with.
Whenever I've heard of these kinds of scams (including a related one involving physical goods they send you and you ship overseas) I always wondered why people were so honest and actually went through with it instead of just keeping the money.
It'd be like Bernie Madoff walking up to you with a suitcase of cash, asking you to go deposit it at some bank across town. Yeah, sure, Bernie. I'll call you when I'm done.
You know... if stupidity was illegal just about everyone would be prosecuted.
I always thought that intent was important when being charged with a crime.
Once upon a time that was true. I just read a column that talked about how over the last few years (5-20, I don't remember the time frame more closely than that) more and more laws don't take any notice of intent. I wish I could remember where I saw it.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Unless you intended to make a very subtle distinction between a lack of knowledge of money laundering specifically versus a general lack of knowledge of a criminal act, I vehemently disagree. There is no such thing as a "strict liability" accessory crime in the United States.
Accessory statutes descending from English legal tradition, such as those in the U.S., require at least some form of knowledge of a criminal act (just not necessarily the criminal act committed by the principal). Do you know why? Because if being an accessory to say, money laundering, was a strict liability offense, then in the following:
A. Money launderer obtains proceeds of criminal endeavor
B. Money launderer buys plasma TV at Best Buy
C. Money launderer sells plasma TV on eBay to an arms-length buyer at market price.
all of Best Buy, eBay, and buyer are accessories to a felony. Full stop. This is patently ridiculous -- nobody could buy anything from an ordinary third party, or arguably broker a third party sale, for fear of becoming an accessory to a criminal act. Anything not purchased from the OEM would be suspect to varying degrees, and if your due diligence was both reasonable and wrong then you'd still an accessory.
The distinction the FBI is drawing is between those few who cannot be charged because they just didn't suspect ("are simply not the sharpest crayons in the box and really did get bamboozled"), and those who can be charged because they had some form of knowledge and intent (as evidenced by things like separating their own funds from the funds they were handling). Mere sympathy does not excuse those in the first group from criminal liability -- the lack of of a sufficient mens rea excludes them from criminal liability.
Yes. In Missouri, in 2003, a 35-year-old man was convicted of statutory rape and unlawful sexual deviancy with a minor (or similiar) when he was raped, at gunpoint, by a 16-year old male, and sent to prison. I don't have the case numbers on hand, just the article from the KC Star.
Yes, when HE WAS A RAPE VICTIM.