Security News
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.
It's only a week since Elon Musk's take-private of Twitter on 28 October 2022. There's been plenty to set the fur flying, starting with Musk's curious choice of metaphor in arriving at Twitter HQ on takeover day with a kitchen sink, as though the company's products and services were already so close to complete that they needed nothing more than the aforementioned dishwashing receptacle to finish things off.
Crypto giveaway scams have evolved into an illicit market segment with multiple services that aim to facilitate fraudulent operations. The growth of fake crypto giveaways can be explained by a significantly enhanced arsenal and availability of tools for crypto scammers, even with low technical skills.
In what can only be described as inevitable, the FBI is warning those eligible for student loan debt relief to keep an eye out for scammers trying to take advantage of President's Biden program. The White House announced limited student loan debt forgiveness in August, with qualifying individuals and joint filers each able to get up to $10,000 of student loan debt forgiven, or double that amount if the person was awarded Pell grants for low-income students.
The Australian Federal Police has arrested a 19-year-old teen from Sydney for allegedly attempting to leverage the data leaked following the Optus data breach late last month to extort victims. Details of the scam were previously shared by 9News Australia reporter Chris O'Keefe on September 27, 2022.