Security News
KuCoin's Twitter account was hacked, allowing attackers to promote a fake giveaway scam that led to the theft of over $22.6K in cryptocurrency. While the account was hacked for only 45 minutes, the crypto exchange says it was enough time for its followers to send 22 Bitcoin and Ethereum transactions, allowing the hackers to steal $22,600.
The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission says Australians lost a record $3.1 billion to scams in 2022, an 80% increase over the total losses recorded in 2021. Most of the losses concern investment scams, which accounted for $1.5 billion, followed by remote access scams that resulted in losses of $229 million, and payment redirection scams that cost victims another $224 million.
A suspected Nigerian fraudster is scheduled to appear in court Friday for his alleged role in a $6 million plot to scam businesses via email. Kosi Goodness Simon-Ebo, 29, is the first of three Nigerian men to have been extradited from Canada to the US after a federal grand jury charged the trio on seven counts including money laundering and wire fraud for their alleged roles in a scheme to defraud victims out of millions of dollars.
The illicit market for crypto giveaway scams has expanded, offering various services to facilitate fraudulent activity. The proliferation of fake crypto giveaways can be attributed to the increased availability of tools for scammers, even those with limited technical skills.
The US Department of Justice has seized cryptocurrency worth about $112 million from accounts linked to so-called pig butchering investment scams. Judges in Arizona, California and Idaho authorized seizure warrants for six virtual currency accounts that prosecutors say were used to launder proceeds of the various frauds that cost victims millions of dollars after they were socially engineered into investing their savings in dodgy digicash schemes.
The Cyber Police of Ukraine, in collaboration with law enforcement officials from Czechia, has arrested several members of a cybercriminal gang that set up phishing sites to target European users. The suspects are alleged to have created more than 100 phishing portals aimed at users in France, Spain, Poland, Czechia, Portugal, and other nations in the region.
After news broke late last week about Silicon Valley Bank's bank run and collapse, security researchers started warning SVB account holders about incoming SVB-related scams and phishing attempts. Proofpoint researchers flagged a campaign using messages supposedly coming from several cryptocurrency brands, trying to trick users into installing a Smart Contract that would transfer the contents of their wallet to the attacker's wallet.
A convincing Twitter scam is targeting bank customers by abusing the quote-tweet feature, as observed by BleepingComputer. Users tagging Twitter accounts of their banks in their tweets-for example, when raising complaints about an issue, should watch out for responses from non-verified Twitter accounts that may closely be impersonating the bank's support staff and instead be a scam.
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.
Newly released Federal Trade Commission data shows that consumers reported losing nearly $8.8 billion to fraud in 2022, an increase of more than 30 percent over the previous year. Consumers reported losing more money to investment scams - more than $3.8 billion-than any other category in 2022.