Security News
Four men suspected of plotting to commit wire fraud and identity theft have been arrested and now face extradition to America. It is alleged they conspired to break into US companies' servers, steal people's personally identifiable information, use that info to file fraudulent tax returns to Uncle Sam, and collect victims' tax refunds.
Spanish National Police have dismantled a cybercrime organization that used fake investment sites to defraud over €12.3 million from 300 victims across Europe. The threat actors then laundered money stolen from victims by moving it from Spanish banks to foreign financial entities where the criminals hoped it was away from the authorities' scrutiny or tracing ability.
For the first time, the U.S. Department of Justice seized seven domains that hosted websites linked to "Pig butchering" scams, where fraudsters trick victims of romance scams into investing in cryptocurrency via fake investment platforms. While originating from Asia, pig butchering scams have spread globally after cryptocurrency scammers realized that users of dating apps and social media sites make for easy targets after building trust using various social engineering tactics.
Over the past year, we've had the unfortunate need to warn our readers not once, but twice, about a scam we've dubbed CryptoRom, a portmanteau word formed from the terms "Cryptocurrency" and "Romance scam". The "Romance" in a CryptoRom scam isn't tugging at your heart strings, but at your wallet strings.
Pig butchering is a newish twist on romance scams in which fraudsters build a relationship with their victims and then con them into transferring money into accounts controlled by the crooks. While the court documents remain sealed, we're told that fraudsters tricked five victims in the US between May and August into transferring their money to the seven now-seized domains designed to look like the Singapore International Monetary Exchange.
The fraudulent scheme, which operated from May to August 2022, netted the actors over $10 million from five victims, the DoJ said. The criminals encounter potential victims on dating apps, social media sites, and SMS messages.
The bad thing about this scam is that it's astonishingly easy for criminals to set up, and it carefully avoids sending spoofed emails or tricking you to visit bogus websites, because the crooks use a PayPal service to generate their initial contact via official PayPal servers. Email scammers therefore often go out of their way to ensure that their first contact with potential victims involves messages that really do come from genuine sites or online services, and that link to servers that really are run by those same legitimate sites.
An active extortion scam is targeting website owners and admins worldwide, claiming to have hacked their servers and demanding $2,500 not to leak data. The scam is so widespread that our own reporter Ax Sharma and Have I Been Breached created Troy Hunt have also received these extortion attempts.
Nigerian-born Ramon Olorunwa Abbas, 40, also known as Ray Hushpuppi, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and will spend 11 years and three months behind bars in the United States for his role in multiple online fraud sprees. Photos of Abbas captured from his accounts show him living it up from his ill-gotten gains: relaxing on private jets, standing by luxury cars, ad so on.
Twitter has officially rolled out its Twitter Blue program for an $8 monthly fee that confers upon the Tweeter multiple benefits, including the much-sought blue badge. A stark distinction so far that separates Twitter Blue accounts with the blue badge from 'notable' accounts verified prior to the new policy rollout is the wording contained within the blue badge.