Entries Tagged "fraud"

Page 24 of 35

Weird Lottery Hack

This is a weird story:

On January 4, 2005 Dr Lee and Ms Day presented their Lotto ticket at the World Square Newsagency Bookshop. A friend took their photo with the ticket before they handed it in and filled in a claim form.

After the transaction, the employee who had served them, Chrishartato Ongkoputra, known as Chris Ong, substituted their claim form for one of his own. He then sent his form, and their winning ticket, to NSW Lotteries.

“The stars really aligned for him,” said the barrister James Stevenson, SC, who is representing newsagents Michael Pavellis and his partner Sheila Urech-Tan.

Mr Ong knew that NSW Lotteries would not pay out for 14 days. He told his boss he was having visa problems and needed to return temporarily to Indonesia. He gambled that the backpackers would not chase up their win until after he had left the country.

Gutsy.

Posted on May 7, 2007 at 11:07 AM • View Comments

Top 10 Internet Crimes of 2006

According to the Internet Crime Complaint Center and reported in U.S. News and World Report, auction fraud and non-delivery of items purchased are far and away the most common Internet crimes. Identity theft is way down near the bottom.

Although the number of complaints last year­207,492­fell by 10 percent, the overall losses hit a record $198 million. By far the most reported crime: Internet auction fraud, garnering 45 percent of all complaints. Also big was nondelivery of merchandise or payment, which notched second at 19 percent. The biggest money losers: those omnipresent Nigerian scam letters, which fleeced victims on average of $5,100 ­followed by check fraud at $3,744 and investment fraud at $2,694.

[…]

The feds caution that these figures don’t represent a scientific sample of just how much Net crime is out there. They note, for example, that the high number of auction fraud complaints is due, in part, to eBay and other big E-commerce outfits offering customers direct links to the IC3 website. And it’s tough to measure what may be the Web’s biggest scourge, child porn, simply by complaints. Still, the survey is a useful snapshot, even if it tells us what we already know: that the Internet, like the rest of life, is full of bad guys. Caveat emptor.

Posted on April 24, 2007 at 12:25 PM • View Comments

Story of a Credit Card Fraudster

A two–part story from The Guardian: an excerpt from Other People’s Money: The Rise And Fall Of Britain’s Most Audacious Credit Card Fraudster.

The first time I did the WTS, it was on a man from London who was staying in a £400 hotel room in Glasgow. I used my hotel phone trick to get his card and personal information—fortunately, he was a trusting individual. I then called his card company and explained that I was the gentleman concerned, in Glasgow on business, and had suffered the theft of my wallet and passport. I was understandably distraught, lying on my bed in Battlefield and speaking quietly so my parents couldn’t hear, and wondered what the company suggested I do. The sympathetic woman at the other end proposed I take a cash advance set against my account, which they could have ready for collection within a couple of hours at a wire transfer operator.

Posted on April 4, 2007 at 6:25 AM • View Comments

Crazy Eddie Financial Fraud

This is an old article—from 2000—but the sidebar (at the end) describing how the electronics store Crazy Eddie committed massive financial fraud is fascinating.

There are numerous ways to classify financial statement frauds. Our research divided them into five principal, but related, types. One of the most outrageous aspects of the Crazy Eddie’s fraud is that he used all five methods. This is how he did it.

Posted on March 30, 2007 at 6:33 AM • View Comments

Stealing and Reselling Phone Minutes

Interesting new variation of phone fraud:

For the telecoms, the profit is in using VoIP to deliver calls from one phone to another. That requires a “gateway” server to connect a carrier’s phone network to the Net. Phreakers break into these gateways, steal “voice minutes” and sell them to other, usually smaller, telecoms. Many of these firms then sell printed phone cards or operate call centers. “It’s a great racket,” says Justin Newman, CEO of BinFone Telecom of Baltimore, which has been stung by phreakers.

Posted on March 21, 2007 at 11:20 AM • View Comments

Huge Online Bank Heist

Wow:

Swedish bank Nordea has told ZDNet UK that it has been stung for between seven and eight million Swedish krona—up to £580,000—in what security company McAfee is describing as the “biggest ever” online bank heist.

Over the last 15 months, Nordea customers have been targeted by emails containing a tailormade Trojan, said the bank.

Nordea believes that 250 customers have been affected by the fraud, after falling victim to phishing emails containing the Trojan. According to McAfee, Swedish police believe Russian organised criminals are behind the attacks. Currently, 121 people are suspected of being involved.

This is my favorite line:

Ehlin blamed successful social engineering for the heist, rather than any deficiencies in Nordea security procedures.

Um…hello? Are you an idiot, or what?

Posted on January 23, 2007 at 12:54 PM • View Comments

Gift Card Hack

This is a clever hack against gift cards:

Seems they take the cards off the racks in stores and copy down the serial numbers. Later on, they check to see if the card is activated, and if the answer is yes, they go on a shopping spree from the store’s website.

What’s the security problem? A serial number on the cards that’s visible even though the card is not activated. This could be mitigated by hiding the serial number behind a scratch-off coating, or opaque packaging.

Posted on December 8, 2006 at 12:06 PM • View Comments

MPAA Kills Anti-Pretexting Bill

Remember pretexting? It’s the cute name given to…well…fraud. It’s when you call someone and pretend to be someone else, in order to get information. Or when you go online and pretend to be someone else, in order to get something. There’s no question in my mind that it’s fraud and illegal, but it seems to be a gray area.

California is considering a bill that would make this kind of thing illegal, and allow victims to sue for damages.

Who could be opposed to this? The MPAA, that’s who:

The bill won approval in three committees and sailed through the state Senate with a 30-0 vote. Then, according to Lenny Goldberg, a lobbyist for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the measure encountered unexpected, last-minute resistance from the Motion Picture Association of America.

“The MPAA has a tremendous amount of clout and they told legislators, ‘We need to pose as someone other than who we are to stop illegal downloading,'” Goldberg said.

These people are looking more and more like a criminal organization every day.

EDITED TO ADD (12/11): Congress has outlawed pretexting. The law doesn’t go as far as some of the state laws—which it pre-empts—but it’s still a good thing.

Posted on December 4, 2006 at 7:38 AM • View Comments

1 … 22 23 24 25 26 … 35

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.