Cyber cops catch cyber crooks
One reason we've seen so much internet-related crime is that for too long the criminals thought they could be safely remote and anonymous. Police are now getting much better at solving this global problem.
Carders are the people who steal credit card data and use it to make fraudulent online purchases or clone fake cards. Carder Forums are internet websites where carders meet to buy and sell stolen credit card data by the thousand, as well as exchanging all sorts of virus programs and spyware, hacking tools, and stolen identity documents. Although they describe themselves as "underground", its shockingly easy to find carder forums using nothing more than Google. The good news is, it makes it a little easier for the police forces to find and infiltrate these circles too.
For the last two years, the FBI has been running a fake forum called carderprofit.cc which culminated in arrests last month. The forum had 2,000 registered members including one who went by the name of Josh The God, leader of the UG Nazi Blackshirt Hacking Crew, and who was also the founder of another carders forum. He was arrested when he tried to withdraw funds from an ATM machine using fake cards obtained through the FBI's sting site. The 24 arrests include eleven suspects in the USA, six in the UK, two in Bosnia, and the remainder from Bulgaria, Germany, Italy, Norway and Australia. This may not be many arrests compared to the 2,000 registered members, but it all helps to make carding a more dangerous game to play.
Over in China, police have cracked a cyber gang accused of making millions by selling fake professional qualification certificates in fields such as medicine, architecture and accounting. The gang was hacking into government websites to generate authentic certificates which came with valid issue numbers and were recorded in official databases. They were charging up to £1000 per certificate and it is thought that 30,000 forged certificates have been issued. So far, 165 people involved in the scam have been arrested.
Police here in the UK have also scored cyber crime successes. Two fraudsters (Damola Olatunji, aged 37, and Amos Mwangi, 26) have both been sentenced to a little over three years in jail for separate scams which netted some £300,000 by targeting students applying for university loans. In other words, these fraudsters were targeting young people who were likely still at school, young people who will have had little experience of dealing with such large finances before. Both fraudsters used the typical phishing scam where victims receive plausible sounding emails, supposedly from the Student Loan Company, asking them to update their banking details at forged websites.
This timely story is a good reminder that we are once again approaching the student loan phishing season. If any of your friends or family will be heading off to university in a few month's time, it wouldn't do any harm to make sure they know about these student loan scammers.
26th July 2012
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.