Security News
In September, the bureau said such schemes usually include initial contact through dating apps or other social media sites and, through creating an online relationship with the targeted victim, the scammer pitches a cryptocurrency investment or other trading opportunities promising significant profits. Nicole Hoffman, senior cyberthreat intelligence analyst with cybersecurity vendor Digital Shadows, told The Register that romance scams are among the most common financially motivated cybercrimes, and prey on emotions and rely on social engineering.
Sadly, over the years, we've needed to write numerous Naked Security warnings about romance scammers and sextortionists. The bad news is that there is a form of online sexual extortion that is effectively hybrid of romance scamming and porn scamming, where the criminals involved do indeed have content with which to blackmail you.
Attackers are using an oft-used and still effective lure to steal credentials to key Microsoft apps by sending emails notifying potential victims that they have a voicemail message, researchers have found. One aspect of the campaign that does set it apart from other similarly themed attacks is that it involves "More research and effort as the attacks are customized for each target," he said.
Seventy-four percent of consumers say they have received a scam text so far this year, while as many as 83% have received a scam phone call, according to Allstate Identity Protection's first quarter Identity Fraud in Focus report. Although even successful scams sometimes fail to escalate to instances of full-blown identity theft - and therefore are not counted toward Allstate Identity Protection case counts - they are nonetheless burdensome and costly to victims.
Law enforcement agencies around the world have arrested about 2,000 people and seized $50 million in a sweeping operation crackdown of social engineering and other scam operations around the globe. In the latest action in the ongoing "First Light", an operation Interpol has coordinated annually since 2014, law enforcement officials from 76 countries raided 1,770 call centers suspected of running fraudulent operations such as telephone and romance scams, email deception scams, and financial crimes.
For months now, millions of Facebook users have been duped by the same phishing scam that cons users into handing over their account credentials. According to a report outlining the phishing campaign, the scam is still active and continues to push victims to a fake Facebook login page where victims are enticed to submit their Facebook credentials.
There's no such thing as free beer for Father's Day - at least not from Heineken. "This is a scam and is not sanctioned by Heineken," the beermaker said in a tweet, adding it has alerted the UK's national fraud and cybercrime reporting agency.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission says Americans have reported losing more than $1 billion worth of cryptocurrency to scams between January 2021 and March 2022. The U.S. law enforcement agency said that tens of thousands of reports pointed to over $1.6 billion in cryptocurrency losses.
A crew using malware that performs cryptomining and clipboard-hacking operations have made off with at least $1.7 million in stolen cryptocurrency. They also observed that there are several design similarities between Clipminer and KryptoCibule - another cryptomining trojan that, a few months before Clipminer hit the scene, was detected and written about by ESET analysts.
The scam industry is becoming more structured and involves more and more parties divided into hierarchical groups, according to Group-IB. The number of such groups jumped to a record high of 390, which is 3.5 times more than last year, when the maximum number of active groups was close to 110. Due to Scam-as-a-Service, in 2021 the number of cybercriminals in one scam gang increased 10 times compared to 2020 and now reaches 100.