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.'"

Comments

The most interesting part

[QuantumG]

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.