Security News > 2022 > December > Weep for the cybercriminals who fell for online scams and lost $2.5m last year

Scammers have scammed their fellow cybercriminals out of more than $2.5 million on three dark web forums alone over the last 12 months, according to Sophos researchers.

In a Black Hat Europe session, Sophos threat hunters detailed their investigation, which examined scams on two well-established Russian-language marketplaces, Exploit and XSS. They also looked at BreachForums, which launched in April 2022 after a Europol-led operation shut down the earlier version of the stolen-data souk, RaidForums.

"We even found instances where threat actors got revenge by scamming the scammers who scammed them."

Exploit, which has about 2,500 reported scams, has two: one for claims and another, the Black List, for confirmed scams.

These have been around since the mid-2000s, along with closed Russian attacker forum XSS, which reported around 760 scams on its site, according to Sophos.

While higher-end scams on all three forums hit six figures - $160,000 on Exploit and XSS are the most lucrative - some victims on these sites have filed claims for as little as $2, according to Wixey.

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