Security News
Gift card fraud still fills a distressing niche in the cybercrime ecosystem, where a gang of crooks redeem gift cards that you paid for, either because you were convinced that those cards were earmarked for something else, or because the crooks got temporary access to one of your online accounts that allowed them to buy gift cards on your dime. The US Department of Justice announced this week the indictment of four suspected gift card scammers, and alleges that that these four had ended up with more than 5000 fradulently obtained cards to spend on themselves.
"Worried about dirty funds in your BTC address? Come check out Antinalysis, the new address risk analyzer," reads the service's announcement, pointing to a link only accessible via ToR. "This service is dedicated to individuals that have the need to possess complete privacy on the blockchain, offering a perspective from the opponent's point of view in order for the user to comprehend the possibility of his/her funds getting flagged down under autocratic illegal charges." "Some people might ask, why go into all that? Just cash out in XMR and be done with it. The problem is, cashing out in Monero raises eyebrows on exchanges and mail by cash method is sometimes risky as well. If you use BTC->XMR->BTC method, you'll still get flagged down by our services labelled as high risk exchange. Our service provides you with a view from LE/exchange's perspective of things that provides you with basic knowledge of how"clean" your address is.
The Security Service of Ukraine took down a network of cryptocurrency exchanges used to anonymize transactions since the beginning of 2021. "The clandestine cryptocurrency exchanges were in demand because they provided anonymity of transactions and possibility of money laundering," the SBU said.
An Israeli national has pleaded guilty to his role in operating DeepDotWeb, a website that functioned as a gateway to various Dark Web marketplaces, the U.S. Justice Department announced on Wednesday. The man, Tal Prihar, 37, together with co-defendant Michael Phan, 34, of Israel, owned and operated DeepDotWeb between October 2013 and May 2019, when the website was seized by authorities.
The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday said that an Israeli national pleaded guilty for his role as an "Administrator" of a portal called DeepDotWeb, a "News" website that "Served as a gateway to numerous dark web marketplaces." According to the unsealed court documents, Tal Prihar, 37, an Israeli citizen residing in Brazil, operated DDW alongside Michael Phan, 34, of Israel, starting October 2013, in return for which they received kickbacks from the operators of the marketplaces in the form of virtual currency amounting to 8,155 bitcoins.
Scott Matteson: How is technology being used for money laundering efforts? Gudmundur Kristjansson: Money laundering begins when illegal sums are deposited in a bank, which triggers a complex sequence of banking transfers or commercial transactions that return the money to the launderer in an obscure and indirect way.
Two Ukrainians charged for their involvement in a network providing cash-out and money laundering services to cybercriminals have been extradited to the United States. According to the indictment, the two were part of a cash-out and money laundering network offering services to cybercriminals who accessed bank accounts using stolen credentials, and then transferred funds to drop accounts maintained by the cash-out actors.
U.S. federal prosecutors have charged John McAfee, founder of cybersecurity firm McAfee, and his executive advisor Jimmy Gale Watson Jr for cryptocurrency fraud and money laundering. In total, McAfee, Watson, and other members of the McAfee Team were able to collect over $13 million from two cryptocurrency pump-and-dump schemes, according to court documents.
To empower its customers in the fight against financial crime, Computer Services has partnered with Featurespace to launch a holistic anti-money laundering solution: WatchDOG AML. WatchDOG AML protects against financial crime by identifying suspicious activity in real-time with an enterprise transaction monitoring system. Using customizable machine learning models that utilize Featurespace's award-winning Adaptive Behavioral Analytics, WatchDOG AML reduces false positives while predicting and adapting to new threats through anomaly detection.
"The traditional processes that banks and other financial institutions employ are a bit resource-intensive and often those processes are manual so they've innovated to add some software modeling in an attempt to draw inferences from patterns that they see in their transactions and in their operations to help inform a potential theft, fraud or money laundering," said Michael Reed, director of the Blockchain Program at Intel. "But even those have high false-positive rates which can be disruptive to their customer relationships and also just cost them more time and money in their operations. Confidential computing is a new tool that banks and other corporations are using to help address their own security challenges. It's an emerging technology that helps secure data while it's in use."