British police investigate 'cash-for-citizenship' scam
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British police are investigating an alleged scam where conmen may have helped hundreds of migrants cheat some of the requirements for British citizenship, a newspaper reported in an early edition.
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Man who masterminded scam to charge people thousands of pounds for American work visas is sentenced to 15 months in prison
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City of London awash with rumours that Â£3.7bn fraud is at the heart of the market turmoil
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Revenue and Customs officers investigating a suspected Â£20m fraud arrest six people after a lengthy inquiry.
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Trojan spam scam nipped in the bud German police have arrested ten people suspected of running a phishing scam designed to raid the contents of online bank accounts that netted hundreds of thousands of euros.â¦
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Zimbabwean police arrested a British businessman, Nicholas van Hoogstraten, after finding a large quantity of foreign currency and pornographic material in his possession, state media reported Saturday.
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The British government is considering "coercion" tactics to force people to get biometric identity cards, according to a report to be published in a Sunday newspaper based on a leaked document.
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It has emerged that police in Northern Ireland were told about men acting suspiciously outside the Northern Bank headquarters in Belfast city centre from which Â£22m was stolen on Monday.
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Police arrested a third person in connection with an inquiry into alleged cash for honours in Parliament, they said, shortly after rebailing Lord Michael Levy, an ally of Prime Minister Tony Blair.
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Police forces across Britain are being urged to reveal how much money is being paid to informers.
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A London solicitor is charged with immigration offences.
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British authorities were investigating claims Monday that a member of Uganda's governing party secured a job in the British immigration service and stymied asylum applications of political opponents.
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British police said on Friday they had  detained a man who claimed to have sent one of a series of  letter bombs to hit the country in past weeks but added that  they continue to investigate a number of other leads.
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Spanish police have said they have arrested a British man on the island of Ibiza on suspicion of money laundering in the southern resort of Marbella.
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(InfoWorld) - A security expert has cracked one of the U.K.'s new biometric passports, which the British government hopes will cut down on cross-border crime and illegal immigration. The attack, which uses a common RFID (radio frequency identification) reader and customized code,Â siphoned data off an RFID chipÂ from a passport in a sealed envelope, said Adam Laurie, a security consultant who has worked with RFID and Bluetooth technology. The attack would be invisible to victims, he said. "That's the really scary thing," said Laurie, whose work was detailed in the Sunday edition of the Daily Mail newspaper. "There's no evidence of tampering. They're not going to report something has happened because they don't know." The British government, which began issuing RFID passports about a year ago, eventually wants to incorporate fingerprints and other biometric data on the chips, although privacy activists are concerned over how data will be stored and handled. Currently, the chip contains the printed details on the passports, the person's photograph, and security technology to detect if those files have been altered. The attack was executed while the passport was still in its original envelope used to send it from the passport service, since RFID chips can be read from a few inches away, Laurie said. He used a passport ordered by a woman affiliated with No2ID, a group that opposes the U.K.'s biometric passport and ID card programs. The data on the passport's chip is locked until an RFID reader provides the encryption key, Laurie said. The encryption key is calculated using a combination of the person's personal data, such as date of birth, and is contained in the "machine-readable zone" (MZR) -- the string of characters and digits on the bottom of the passport's first page. At an immigration desk, the optical character reader scans the MZR and gets the key. The RFID chip is unlocked, and the information on the chip is matched with that on the passport. However, Laurie was able to do this process himself. He analyzed ICAO 9303, the standard from the International Civil Aviation Organization that been adopted worldwide for machine-readable passports, to see how the MZR is organized. Laurie also knew some of the woman's personal details -- used to calculate her passport's key -- and found out more through Internet research. He then wrote what's known as a "brute force" program, which repeatedly tries different combinations of data to discover the key. After about 40,000 attempts by the program, he cracked the key. To scan the chip, he used a common RFID reader from ACG ID, now part of Assa Abloy Identification Technology of Germany. The attack could then let Laurie begin the process of making an exact copy of the woman's passport. "[The biometric passport] has been sold to us as something that increases the security of the passport, but so far I don't see anything about it that increases my security," Laurie said. The greatest weakness with the passports is using relatively easy-to-find data to compose the encrypted key, Laurie said. It would be better to include more random elements that would render brute-force style programs nearly useless, he said. Laurie's work spawned from concern over how users can know what's on their passport's chip. "At the moment, if you want to see what's in your own passport, you have to go to passport office," Laurie said. "With my code, you can do it at home." Laurie has published a library of open-source tools written in the Python programming language that will run on RFID readers made by ACG and by Frosch Electronics, based in Austria. Â
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The UK has seen an 8,000% increase in fake internet banking scams in the past two years, peers are told.
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A Romanian foreign exchange student was arrested after police found him sending large sums of money overseas.