Security News
A Federal grand jury in the District of Oregon has indicted four Russian nationals founders of Forsage decentralized finance cryptocurrency investment platform for allegedly running a global Ponzi and pyramid scheme that raised $340 million. The defendants, Vladimir Okhotnikov, Olena Oblamska, Mikhail Sergeev, and Sergey Maskalov, face charges of running aggressive false advertisements on social media, pushing misleading investment and business opportunities related to Forsage to aspiring investors.
Popular cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase disclosed that it experienced a cybersecurity attack that targeted its employees. One employee is said to have fallen for the scam, who entered their username and password in a fake login page set up by the threat actors to harvest the credentials.
Having contacted Shams after reading his story in The Register, Hunter quickly learned that there are more victims out there. "Everything seemed to check out," Hunter told The Register.
In it, a pig butchering romance scammer targets her next victim: Sophos's lead threat researcher. "I was approached by multiple, separate scam operations personally, each running different variations on pig butchering," Sophos's principal threat researcher Sean Gallagher wrote in a blog post today about one of these attempts.
"Pig butchering" is the colorful name given to online cons that trick the victim into giving money to the scammer, thinking it is an investment opportunity. It's a rapidly growing area of fraud, and getting more sophisticated.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission says Americans once again reported record losses of $1.3 billion to romance scams in 2022, with median losses of $4,400. "Last year's romance scam numbers looked a lot like 2021 all over again, and it's not a pretty picture. In 2022, nearly 70,000 people reported a romance scam, and reported losses hit a staggering $1.3 billion," the FTC said.
Scammers are now exploiting the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Turkey and Syria: this time stealing donations by abusing legitimate platforms like PayPal and Twitter. BleepingComputer has identified multiple scams running on Twitter and abusing legitimate platforms like PayPal's fundraising pages to create convincing scam websites and collect proceeds from donors hoping to aid earthquake victims.
Operators of high-yielding investment scams known as "Pig butchering" have found a way to bypass the defenses in Google Play and Apple's App Store, the official repositories for Android and iOS apps. After gaining the victims' trust, the scammers say that they have an uncle working for a financial analysis firm and launch an invitation to trade cryptocurrency via an app on Play Store or App Store.
European cops arrested 15 suspected scammers and shut down a multi-country network of call centers selling fake cryptocurrency that law enforcement said stole upwards of hundreds of million euros from victims. The scammers tricked their victims into investing large sums of money into fake cryptocurrency schemes according to Europol, which became involved in the investigation in June 2022 at the behest of German law enforcement agencies.
In a new post by MetaMask, the developers warn of a new scam called 'Address Poisoning' that relies on poisoning the wallet's transaction history with scammer's addresses that are very similar to addresses that a user recently had transactions. The threat actor then sends the targeted sender's address a small amount of cryptocurrency, or even a $0 token transaction, from this new address so that the transaction appears in their wallet's history.