Security News
Seventy-four percent of consumers say they have received a scam text so far this year, while as many as 83% have received a scam phone call, according to Allstate Identity Protection's first quarter Identity Fraud in Focus report. Although even successful scams sometimes fail to escalate to instances of full-blown identity theft - and therefore are not counted toward Allstate Identity Protection case counts - they are nonetheless burdensome and costly to victims.
Law enforcement agencies around the world have arrested about 2,000 people and seized $50 million in a sweeping operation crackdown of social engineering and other scam operations around the globe. In the latest action in the ongoing "First Light", an operation Interpol has coordinated annually since 2014, law enforcement officials from 76 countries raided 1,770 call centers suspected of running fraudulent operations such as telephone and romance scams, email deception scams, and financial crimes.
The Identity Theft Resource Center and LexisNexis Risk Solutions have released the Pandemic-Related Identity Fraud Crime Victim Impacts Report, which shows how individuals and government agencies have been impacted since 2020 by an unprecedented wave of government benefits identity fraud. "We speak with identity crime victims every day at the ITRC," said Eva Velasquez, President and CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center.
An analysis of the mobile threat landscape in 2022 shows that Spain and Turkey are the most targeted countries for malware campaigns, even as a mix of new and existing banking trojans are increasingly targeting Android devices to conduct on-device fraud. "Just in the first five months of 2022 there has been an increase of more than 40% in malware families that abuse Android OS to perform fraud using the device itself, making it almost impossible to detect them using traditional fraud scoring engines."
Bad bots are often the first indicator of online fraud and represent a risk to digital businesses, as well as their customers. In 2021, evasive bad bots - a grouping of moderate and advanced bad bots that elude standard security defenses - made up 65.6% of all bad bot traffic.
The US government has recovered over $15 million in proceeds from the 3ve digital advertising fraud operation that cost businesses more than $29 million for ads that were never viewed. The action, Peace added, "Sends a powerful message to those involved in cyber fraud that there are no boundaries to prosecuting these bad actors and locating their ill-gotten assets wherever they are in the world."
The US government has recovered over $15 million from Swiss bank accounts belonging to operators behind the '3ve' online advertising fraud scheme. 84 to the US government as part of a Final Order of Forfeiture related to United States v. Sergey Ovsyannikov, one of the conspirators in the global ad fraud campaign.
Noting that banking fraud continues to rise, the data-driven research study found a 41% increase in attempted fraud over a similar evaluation conducted the year before by its data scientists. Data scientists and fraud subject matter experts compiled anonymized data secured from a subset of its total monitored transactions, including both online and offline payments channels that covered ACH, wires, checks, card purchases, and P2P transactions.
Visa has invested $9 billion over a five-year period to fund new fraud and security initiatives that include multi-layered cybersecurity, AI and analytics to further secure digital transactions. One service, Visa's flagship predictive analytics product Advanced Authorization, prevented an estimated $26 billion in fraud in 2021, according to Michael Jabbara, vice president and global head of fraud at Visa, in a recent interview with TechRepublic.
China's Ministry of Public Security has revealed the five most prevalent types of fraud perpetrated online or by phone. The e-commerce scam known as "Brushing" topped the list and accounted for around a third of all internet fraud activity in China.