Employment Scam
Interesting story of an old-school remote-deposit capture fraud scam, wrapped up in a fake employment scam.
Slashdot thread.
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June 10, 2019 employment, fraud, scams, Security technology Read more >
Amazon Is Losing the War on Fraudulent Sellers
Excellent article on fraudulent seller tactics on Amazon.
The most prominent black hat companies for US Amazon sellers offer ways to manipulate Amazon’s ranking system to promote products, protect accounts from disciplinary actions, and crush competitors. Sometimes, these black hat companies bribe corporate Amazon employees to leak information from the company’s wiki pages and business reports, which they then resell to marketplace sellers for steep prices. One black hat company charges as much as $10,000 a month to help Amazon sellers appear at the top of product search results. Other tactics to promote sellers’ products include removing negative reviews from product pages and exploiting technical loopholes on Amazon’s site to lift products’ overall sales rankings.
[…]
AmzPandora’s services ranged from small tasks to more ambitious strategies to rank a product higher using Amazon’s algorithm. While it was online, it offered to ping internal contacts at Amazon for $500 to get information about why a seller’s account had been suspended, as well as advice on how to appeal the suspension. For $300, the company promised to remove an unspecified number of negative reviews on a listing within three to seven days, which would help increase the overall star rating for a product. For $1.50, the company offered a service to fool the algorithm into believing a product had been added to a shopper’s cart or wish list by writing a super URL. And for $1,200, an Amazon seller could purchase a “frequently bought together” spot on another marketplace product’s page that would appear for two weeks, which AmzPandora promised would lead to a 10% increase in sales.
This was a good article on this from last year. (My blog post.)
Amazon has a real problem here, primarily because trust in the system is paramount to Amazon’s success. As much as they need to crack down on fraudulent sellers, they really want articles like these to not be written.
Slashdot thread. Boing Boing post.
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May 9, 2019 amazon, fraud, reputation, scams, Security technology, trust Read more >
Using Gmail “Dot Addresses” to Commit Fraud
In Gmail addresses, the dots don’t matter. The account “bruceschneier@gmail.com” maps to the exact same address as “bruce.schneier@gmail.com” and “b.r.u.c.e.schneier@gmail.com” — and so on. (Note: I own none of those addresses, if they are actually valid.)
This fact can be used to commit fraud:
Recently, we observed a group of BEC actors make extensive use of Gmail dot accounts to commit a large and diverse amount of fraud. Since early 2018, this group has used this fairly simple tactic to facilitate the following fraudulent activities:
- Submit 48 credit card applications at four US-based financial institutions, resulting in the approval of at least $65,000 in fraudulent credit
- Register for 14 trial accounts with a commercial sales leads service to collect targeting data for BEC attacks
- File 13 fraudulent tax returns with an online tax filing service
- Submit 12 change of address requests with the US Postal Service
- Submit 11 fraudulent Social Security benefit applications
- Apply for unemployment benefits under nine identities in a large US state
- Submit applications for FEMA disaster assistance under three identities
In each case, the scammers created multiple accounts on each website within a short period of time, modifying the placement of periods in the email address for each account. Each of these accounts is associated with a different stolen identity, but all email from these services are received by the same Gmail account. Thus, the group is able to centralize and organize their fraudulent activity around a small set of email accounts, thereby increasing productivity and making it easier to continue their fraudulent behavior.
This isn’t a new trick. It has been previously documented as a way to trick Netflix users.
News article.
Slashdot thread.
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February 6, 2019 creditcards, email, fraud, gmail, scams, Security technology Read more >
Sophisticated Voice Phishing Scams
Brian Krebs is reporting on some new and sophisticated phishing scams over the telephone.
I second his advice: “never give out any information about yourself in response to an unsolicited phone call.” Always call them back, and not using the number offered to you by the caller. Always.
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October 2, 2018 fraud, phishing, scams, Security technology, socialengineering Read more >
1834: The First Cyberattack
Tom Standage has a great story of the first cyberattack against a telegraph network.
The Blanc brothers traded government bonds at the exchange in the city of Bordeaux, where information about market movements took several days to arrive from Paris by mail coach. Accordingly, traders who could get the information more quickly could make money by anticipating these movements. Some tried using messengers and carrier pigeons, but the Blanc brothers found a way to use the telegraph line instead. They bribed the telegraph operator in the city of Tours to introduce deliberate errors into routine government messages being sent over the network.
The telegraph’s encoding system included a “backspace” symbol that instructed the transcriber to ignore the previous character. The addition of a spurious character indicating the direction of the previous day’s market movement, followed by a backspace, meant the text of the message being sent was unaffected when it was written out for delivery at the end of the line. But this extra character could be seen by another accomplice: a former telegraph operator who observed the telegraph tower outside Bordeaux with a telescope, and then passed on the news to the Blancs. The scam was only uncovered in 1836, when the crooked operator in Tours fell ill and revealed all to a friend, who he hoped would take his place. The Blanc brothers were put on trial, though they could not be convicted because there was no law against misuse of data networks. But the Blancs’ pioneering misuse of the French network qualifies as the world’s first cyber-attack.
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May 31, 2018 cyberattack, fraud, historyofsecurity, scams, Security technology Read more >
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.”
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May 29, 2018 australia, china, fraud, kidnapping, scams, Security technology Read more >
Supermarket Shoplifting
The rise of self-checkout has caused a corresponding rise in shoplifting.
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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.
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January 23, 2018 botnets, cryptocurrency, hacking, malware, scams, Security technology Read more >
Tourist Scams
A comprehensive list. Most are old and obvious, but there are some clever variants.
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January 8, 2018 egypt, france, italy, scams, Security technology, spain Read more >
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.
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May 12, 2017 scams, Security technology, socialengineering, voicerecognition Read more >