Entries Tagged "scams"

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Kidnapping Fraud

Fake kidnapping fraud:

“Most commonly we have unsolicited calls to potential victims in Australia, purporting to represent the people in authority in China and suggesting to intending victims here they have been involved in some sort of offence in China or elsewhere, for which they’re being held responsible,” Commander McLean said.

The scammers threaten the students with deportation from Australia or some kind of criminal punishment.

The victims are then coerced into providing their identification details or money to get out of the supposed trouble they’re in.

Commander McLean said there are also cases where the student is told they have to hide in a hotel room, provide compromising photos of themselves and cut off all contact.

This simulates a kidnapping.

“So having tricked the victims in Australia into providing the photographs, and money and documents and other things, they then present the information back to the unknowing families in China to suggest that their children who are abroad are in trouble,” Commander McLean said.

“So quite circular in a sense…very skilled, very cunning.”

Posted on May 29, 2018 at 9:31 AM • View Comments

New Malware Hijacks Cryptocurrency Mining

This is a clever attack.

After gaining control of the coin-mining software, the malware replaces the wallet address the computer owner uses to collect newly minted currency with an address controlled by the attacker. From then on, the attacker receives all coins generated, and owners are none the wiser unless they take time to manually inspect their software configuration.

So far it hasn’t been very profitable, but it—or some later version—eventually will be.

Posted on January 23, 2018 at 6:41 AM • View Comments

Stealing Voice Prints

This article feels like hyperbole:

The scam has arrived in Australia after being used in the United States and Britain.

The scammer may ask several times “can you hear me?”, to which people would usually reply “yes.”

The scammer is then believed to record the “yes” response and end the call.

That recording of the victim’s voice can then be used to authorise payments or charges in the victim’s name through voice recognition.

Are there really banking systems that use voice recognition of the word “yes” to authenticate? I have never heard of that.

Posted on May 12, 2017 at 6:00 AM • View Comments

Research on Tech-Support Scams

Interesting paper: “Dial One for Scam: A Large-Scale Analysis of Technical Support Scams“:

Abstract: In technical support scams, cybercriminals attempt to convince users that their machines are infected with malware and are in need of their technical support. In this process, the victims are asked to provide scammers with remote access to their machines, who will then “diagnose the problem”, before offering their support services which typically cost hundreds of dollars. Despite their conceptual simplicity, technical support scams are responsible for yearly losses of tens of millions of dollars from everyday users of the web.

In this paper, we report on the first systematic study of technical support scams and the call centers hidden behind them. We identify malvertising as a major culprit for exposing users to technical support scams and use it to build an automated system capable of discovering, on a weekly basis, hundreds of phone numbers and domains operated by scammers. By allowing our system to run for more than 8 months we collect a large corpus of technical support scams and use it to provide insights on their prevalence, the abused infrastructure, the illicit profits, and the current evasion attempts of scammers. Finally, by setting up a controlled, IRB-approved, experiment where we interact with 60 different scammers, we experience first-hand their social engineering tactics, while collecting detailed statistics of the entire process. We explain how our findings can be used by law-enforcing agencies and propose technical and educational countermeasures for helping users avoid being victimized by
technical support scams.

BoingBoing post.

Posted on April 12, 2017 at 6:34 AM • View Comments

Virtual Kidnapping

This is a harrowing story of a scam artist that convinced a mother that her daughter had been kidnapped. More stories are here. It’s unclear if these virtual kidnappers use data about their victims, or just call people at random and hope to get lucky. Still, it’s a new criminal use of smartphones and ubiquitous information.

Reminds me of the scammers who call low-wage workers at retail establishments late at night and convince them to do outlandish and occasionally dangerous things.

Posted on October 17, 2016 at 6:28 AM • View Comments

Hijacking Someone's Facebook Account with a Fake Passport Copy

BBC has the story. The confusion is that a scan of a passport is much easier to forge than an actual passport. This is a truly hard problem: how do you give people the ability to get back into their accounts after they’ve lost their credentials, while at the same time prohibiting hackers from using the same mechanism to hijack accounts? Demanding an easy-to-forge copy of a hard-to-forge document isn’t a good solution.

Posted on July 7, 2016 at 1:27 PM • View Comments

New Credit Card Scam

A criminal ring was arrested in Malaysia for credit card fraud:

They would visit the online shopping websites and purchase all their items using phony credit card details while the debugging app was activated.

The app would fetch the transaction data from the bank to the online shopping website, and trick the website into believing that the transaction was approved, when in reality, it had been declined by the bank.

The syndicates would later sell the items they had purchased illegally for a much lower price.

The problem here seems to be bad systems design. Why should the user be able to spoof the merchant’s verification protocol with the bank?

Posted on May 11, 2016 at 6:34 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.