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FBI Recovers $14M From Bogus Business Account Wire Transfers (arstechnica.com)
Federal authorities announced Monday that they had "disrupted" what they call "Business Email Compromise" schemes, which involve a malicious actor sending a phishing email and somehow convincing employees with access to a company's financial credentials to transfer money fraudulently. From a report: The FBI added that $2.4 million dollars was seized, while $14 million in "fraudulent wire transfers" was recovered. Seventy-four people were arrested worldwide, including 42 in the United States, 29 in Nigeria, and three others in Canada, Mauritius, and Poland. "Fraudsters can rob people of their life's savings in a matter of minutes," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement. "These are malicious and morally repugnant crimes. The Department of Justice has taken aggressive action against fraudsters in recent months, conducting the largest sweep of fraud against American seniors in history back in February." The Department of Justice did not immediately provide a full list of those arrested, or the criminal complaints, but it said that, "since the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) began formally keeping track of BEC and its variant, email account compromise (EAC), there has been a loss of over $3.7 billion reported to the IC3."
Amazing that they praise their aptitude for 1/2%.
I'm surprised they didn't say that unbreakable encryption somehow enables these thieves to proliferate. Oh and throw something in about protecting the children for good measure.
The only thing that the FBI should be doing right now is getting evidence for the Trump conviction.
The FBI is part of the problem and we can do better. By going after these people via government(s) and use of force/violence we are basically accepting a system that doesn't work. Only a tiny percentage of people are going to end up scamming significant numbers of people and we'll only ever be able to catch a tiny fraction and catching them doesn't really do anything to even minimize the problem because criminals tend not to consider the consequences or otherwise don't think they will be caught.
The solution to these sorts of scams is to implement systems for the elderly to opt-into which lets them retain control over there day-to-day financials without being able to easily wire large sums of money to other people without a secondary human check. Such systems can be designed relative to a persons financial means that restrict an elderly (or anyone really) person from accessing more than what is financially feasible given a certain amount of time. So basic budgeting in other words. An elderly person may be restricted from withdrawing or otherwise spending more than $300 / week if they have x amount / assets saved for retirement and then if they need to conduct some other large financial transaction they can save up via a secondary account or otherwise be mandated to seek consultation of some kind with an individual they trust.
The blame for these crimes on the criminals is misguided when there are clearly actions that we could and should be taking to ensure we're not taken advantage of in old age. We deserve what we get if we fail as a society to take responsibility for properly resolving these sorts of issues at the technical level rather than just passing the buck to a system that obviously doesn't work (targeting the criminal)- but could be properly fixed.
While $12 million USD were recovered, we are told:
since the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) began formally keeping track of BEC and its variant, email account compromise (EAC), there has been a loss of over $3.7 billion reported to the IC3
$12 million over $3.7 billion, that is a 0.3% recovery. I am not sure it will frighten fraudsters.
The FBI has the money now and those businesses will never see it again.
This has the hallmarks of tech support scammers which means 100% of the geniuses who call the number that pops up on their screen at least partially deserve it. If you're that stupid, you will find a way to lose your money. This is just how it happened in this case.
These were apparently Nigerian spammers. The spammers and scammers are left alone to bring _any_ outside currency into a desperate local economy. A reasonable survey of bribery, reported at https://arstechnica.com/tech-p..., shows bribery as nearly 40% of the national and state budgets, and the police as being the most often bribed. I'm afraid to say that the people prosecuted most likely failed to pay the needed bribes, perhaps due to bankruptcy, and thus were some of the very few scammers ever prosecuted in Nigeria.