Security News > 2023 > February > Resecurity identified the investment scam network Digital Smoke
Resecurity identified one of the largest investment fraud networks by size and volume of operations created to defraud Internet users from Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, European Union, India, Singapore, Malaysia, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, the U.S. and other regions.
Modus operandi of the group was focused on investment options in non-existing products and investment plans supposedly offered by the Fortune 100 corporations and state-owned entities.
The bad actors developed a large network of WEB-resources and related mobile applications hosted on bulletproof hosting providers, and located in jurisdictions not easily reachable for immediate takedowns - the total number of identified hosts in December 2022 alone exceeded 350+ with thousands of related domains used for 'cloaking', hidden redirects and short URLs for protection of the payment gateway used by fraudsters to collect payments from victims leveraging AliPay and Unified Payments Interface - an instant real-time payment system developed by National Payments Corporation of India, along with cryptocurrencies.
The Digital Smoke case is somewhat remarkable and may confirm how investment scams have now become more sophisticated than before.
Fraudsters are investing large amounts of time and effort to prepare high-quality resources which look almost identical to their well-known investment product counterparts - in the case of Digital Smoke, for each investment scam they ran, they also created a separate mobile app with a unique design.
Resecurity identified a large network of money mules leveraging accounts in multiple financial institutions based in India who process the payments from victims.