Security News
An especially popular type of BEC attack is one that uses invoice or payment fraud to steal money from the targeted organization. In the first three months of 2020, invoice and payment fraud BEC attacks increased more than 75%. But the rise was even more pronounced from April to May. Over that period, the volume of these types of BEC campaigns shot up by 200% per week, with a 36% jump in the number of organizations hit by these attacks.
A Russian computer hacker who facilitated $20 million in credit card fraud and ran a sophisticated clearinghouse for international cybercriminals was sentenced Friday to nine years in prison. Prosecutors say Aleksei Burkov of St. Petersburg, Russia, filled a unique niche in the world of cybercrime, describing his Direct Connection website as "The most exclusive criminal forum on the web." Would-be participants had to put up a $5,000 bond and have three existing members vouch for them.
These new data services, when coupled with Jumio's identity verification solutions, deliver powerful fraud signals that help organizations better detect new account and synthetic fraud attempts. New account fraud is becoming one of the biggest problems in the digital banking era, costing the financial services industry billions each year.
The Federal Reserve published the FraudClassifier model - a set of tools and materials to help provide a consistent way to classify and better understand the magnitude of fraudulent activity and how it occurs across the payments industry. The model was developed by the Fraud Definitions Work Group, which was comprised of Federal Reserve and payments industry fraud experts.
Visa said it created the Advanced Identity Score to reduce the amount of digital identity fraud. The company described Advanced Identity Score as an effort to combine "Visa's artificial intelligence and predictive machine learning capabilities with application and identity related data to generate a risk score for new account applications to help reduce fraud, prevent negative impact to brand loyalty and trust, and eliminate operational costs due to remediation."
The United States Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control and the Department of Justice this week announced sanctions against six Nigerian nationals for their involvement in business email compromise and romance fraud schemes. The six, namely Richard Uzuh, Micheal Olorunyomi, Alex Ogunshakin, Felix Okpoh, Nnamdi Benson, and Abiola Kayode, engaged in BEC fraud schemes that resulted in American citizens losing over $6 million, the U.S. Treasury says.
On June 16, authorities in Michigan arrested 29-year-old Justin Sean Johnson in connection with a 43-count indictment on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. The stolen data also included federal form W-2 data that contained income tax and withholding information, records that prosecutors say Johnson sold on dark web marketplaces to identity thieves engaged in tax refund fraud and other financial crimes.
The apps were among a small haul of 38 beauty-themed apps the company detected from the same developer which were reported to Google for bombarding users with unwanted ads. As well as serving out of context ads at every opportunity, the apps also sent users to websites and made it difficult to de-install the apps using techniques such as hiding icons from the home screen and apps folder.
Incognia announced the launch of its location-based behavioral biometrics solution developed to combat rising rates of mobile fraud. Incognia location behavioral biometrics provides a new frictionless weapon for enhanced fraud detection and prevention.
Last week, the U.S. Secret Service warned of "Massive fraud" against state unemployment insurance programs, noting that false filings from a well-organized Nigerian crime ring could end up costing the states and federal government hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. Yes, for roughly $50 worth of bitcoin, you too can quickly jump on the unemployment fraud "Wave" and learn how to swindle unemployment insurance money from different states.