Security News

An open ben, or "Open beneficiary", is explained by the investigator as "An account where a different business account name can be substituted to help in deceiving the victim into sending funds." Presumably, the money launderer's contacts - other cogs in the cybercrime gearbox who send out so-called money mules to open accounts that are later used for fraud - were pushing back against the "Cost" of going through face-to-face KYC checks to open accounts that ended up getting linked to criminality right away.

The FBI warns that tech support scammers are now impersonating financial institutions' refund payment portals to harvest victims' sensitive information and add legitimacy. "Within the body of the email, the scammers will indicate the specific service to be renewed with a price commonly in the range of $300 to $500 USD, provoking a sense of urgency in the victims to contact them and provide information for a refund," the FBI said.

The FBI has released a warning that scammers may be targeting individuals seeking to enroll in the Federal Student Aid program to steal their personal information, payment details, and money. Federal Student Aid is a debt relief program announced in August 2022 that opened for applications yesterday.

Unlike the email ecosystem, where anybody can email anybody, messaging and social media apps such as WhatsApp are based on closed groups. The companies are Rockey Tech HK Ltd, Beijing Luokai Technology Co. Ltd, and Chitchat Technology Ltd. The brand names under which WhatsApp alleges they peddled fake apps and addons are HeyMods, Highlight Mobi, and HeyWhatsApp.

Let's stay on the subject of scams, and talk about scammers and rogue callers. DUCK. Well, there are scam calls and there's nuisance calls.

In this case, we're referring to Elvis Eghosa Ogiekpolor, jailed for 25 years in Atlanta, Georgia for running a cybercrime group that scammed close to $10,000,000 in uunder two years from individuals and business caught up in so-called romance and BEC scams. BEC is short for business email compromise, an umbrella term for a form of online scam in which the attackers acquire login access to email accounts inside a company, so that the fraudulent emails they send don't just seem to come from the company they're attacking, but actually do come from there.

Scammers of this sort are typically based in high-pressure criminal call centres outside your country, but they make use of internet-based calling services that costs pennies a minute to make calls anywhere in the world, yet show up on your phone with a local number to give them an air of legitimacy and traceability. Sometimes the callers aren't quite scammers, and they really are based in your country, working for a registered company, calling from a number that really is local.

A 46-year-old man in the U.S. has been sentenced to 25 years in prison after being found guilty of laundering over $9.5 million accrued by carrying out cyber-enabled financial fraud. Elvis Eghosa Ogiekpolor of Norcross, Georgia, operated a money laundering network that opened at least 50 business bank accounts for illicitly receiving funds from unsuspecting individuals and businesses after falling victim to romance frauds and business email compromise scams.

Yesterday the CAC detailed some of the 12,000 acts of online fraud perpetrated against minors it handled this year. The unfortunate 15 year old, whom the CAC identified as Tan Moumou, was playing a mobile game when an unknown person added him as a friend on messaging platform WeChat and claimed he could circumvent China's gaming restrictions.

Like last time, they created an HTML email with a clickable link that itself looked like a URL, even though the actual URL it linked to was not the one that appeared in the text. This time the link you saw if you hovered over the blue text in the email really was a link to a URL hosted on the facebook.com domain.