Nigerian Scammers Profiting Heavily in Australia
680595
The tried-and-true Nigerian e-mail scam is still going strong in Australia, and reported losses continue to grow.
238483
For some, replying to Internet scams is a rewarding hobby. They call themselves scam-baiters, and they have started taking justice into their own hands.
712324
Foreign backpackers funding their Australian travels through illegal sex work are robbing the legitimate industry of profits and threatening clients' health, a brothel lobbyist has warned.
650596
Scammers still prefer old-world means, FTC study shows With Nigerian 419 scams, phishing attempts and other dubious spam flooding your inbox, you may be tempted to think the net is the epicenter for today's shysters. But it turns out print advertising beat out the internet as the most common means for spreading fraudulent pitches, according to a US consumer survey released Monday by the Federal Trade Commission.â¦
36812
In a twist, security researchers have discovered a group of hackers who are exploiting a new category of victims -- aspiring Internet scammers.A Moroccan group called &quot;Mr. Brain&quot; is offering free phishing kits on a Web site hosted in France, said Paul Mutton, Internet services developer at Netcraft, a security company in Bath, England.The software packages make it easy to quickly set up a fraudulent Web site mimicking a known brand in order to trick people into divulging credit card details or bank account numbers. Templates for spam e-mail are also included, targeting brands such as Bank of America, eBay, PayPal, and HSBC.Mr. Brain&#39;s Web site lists the kits and what kind of details each one is capable of collecting, such as usernames, passwords or Social Security numbers. Netcraft posted screenshots on its Web site.But what the aspiring scammer doesn&#39;t know is that the phishing kits are designed to send any sensitive information that&#39;s collected back to e-mail accounts controlled by Mr. Brain, Mutton said.&quot;Obviously, that&#39;s why they are offering this stuff for free,&quot; Mutton said. &quot;I was impressed by it.&quot;Mr. Brain hides the special e-mail function in a blend of PHP scripts, one of which is encrypted, Mutton said. Just in case someone decrypts it, Mr. Brain has written at the top of the file &quot;Don&#39;t need to change anything here. Created by Mr. Brain Morocco Team.&quot;The scheme seems to be targeted at new phishers, Mutton said. Mr. Brain benefits since other wannabe scammers shoulder the cost and risk of finding an ISP (Internet Service Provider) to host the phishing site, Mutton said.&quot;Essentially, they&#39;re exploiting all these novice phishers -- basically getting them to do all the hard work,&quot; Mutton said.It&#39;s difficult to tell without further research how many of the free phishing kits linked with this latest scam are live on the Internet, but Mutton said Netcraft noticed one earlier this month targeting Bank of America.&quot;Clearly, these are actively being used in phishing attacks,&quot; Mutton said.
160555
Information on individuals has been collected in a scam using e-greetings that appear to come from a secret admirer.
543393
Some Indonesian locals are seeing large-scale relief missions as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to make big bucks.
229134
The selling of the Liberian Embassy Properties in London, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as well as the premises in Lagos, Nigeria is part of the ongoing unbridled corruption that is so ...
731737
Apparently it&#39;s not just unwary individuals that fall victim to online scammers. Even large corporations, it seems, can get suckered into parting with their money by devious&#160;phishers.Case in point: Eden Prairie, MN.-based grocery chain Supervalu, which earlier this year got conned into depositing more than $10 million into two fraudulent bank accounts before recognizing the ruse. Details of the case are contained in court documents filed in connection with two forfeiture cases stemming from the incident.According to federal court filings in the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho, the fraudulent activity took place in late February and early March this year. In the court filings, Stephen Kilgroff, Supervalu&#39;s vice president of legal affairs, said that on February 26 and 28 the company received two separate e-mails, one purporting to be from an employee at American Greetings Corp. and the second from an employee at Frito-Lay, both company-approved vendors.Both e-mails told Supervalu to send future payments for each vendor to new bank account numbers. In the case of the e-mail that purported to be from American Greetings Corp., Supervalu was advised to send payments to an HSBC account in Miami. The other e-mail advised Supervalu to send Frito-Lay payments to an account at First Security Bank in Rogers, Arkansas.Between Feb 28 and March 3, Supervalu deposited just over $6.5 million via multiple wire-transfers to the HSBC account, thinking that it was sending the money to American Greetings Corp. Similarly, on March 2 it made eight separate wire-transfers to the bank in Arkansas, depositing a total of $3.6 million to an account it thought belonged to Frito-Lay.In addition to the $6.5 million deposited by Supervalu into the HSBC account, an additional amount of $500,000 had been deposited into the same account by a second company, identified as &quot;ROHM&quot; on court documents. No information has been available concerning the second company, and it is not a party to subsequent litigation.Around March 6, according to the filings made by Kilgroff, Supervalu discovered that it had been &quot;induced&quot; into making the transfers to the bogus accounts. Following the discovery of the fraud, Supervalu quickly notified the appropriate law enforcement authorities, who managed to recover nearly all of the money before it could be withdrawn from the accounts.The recovered money is now being claimed by Frito-Lay, American Greetings and Supervalu. In making the claim to the recovered money, Frito-Lay said that it believes the money belongs to Supervalu and said supported that company&#39;s claim to ownership of the misdirected funds.&quot;However to the extent there is any determination that the ownership of these funds changed from Albertsons/Supervalu [the Albertsons grocery chain was recently acquired by Supervalu] to Frito-Lay (as a result of the attempted transfer, the misdirection, or any other development) Frito-Lay makes this claim to these funds in the alternative and subject to any claim of ownership by Albertsons/Supervalu&quot; the company said in an affidavit.A federal judge is expected to rule sometime in November on which firm should receive the recovered funds.A spokeswoman from Supervalu responded via e-mail to a request for comment. &quot;As indicated by the forfeiture complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney&#39;s Office in Boise, Supervalu was the target of attempted financial fraud,&quot; spokeswoman Haley Meyer said. &quot;Due to our internal controls and processes, we were able to quickly discover and report this to the FBI. As a result of the quick work of the Boise FBI Office and the U.S. Attorney, any funds lost are minimal.&quot;Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.&#160;
362651
A massive gold producer makes money off of oil, copper, and a global distrust of the dollar.
111950
The ringleader of a Dutch-based Internet scam that raked in up to two million dollars (1.67 million euros) has been arrested in Nigeria, police in Amsterdam said.
689661
Wave of future rolls up on Oz shores House of Cards Australian gaming behemoth Tabcorp achieved a milestone of sorts last week with its announcement that it had for the first time surpassed Aus $1 billion in annual internet revenues, Casinocitytimes.com has reported. The figure constituted a 23% increase over the previous fiscal year.â¦
100526
An Australian pleads guilty to fraud after posing as a dispossessed Nigerian to cheat people of their money. Also: eBay penalizes its own con men & hellip;. Microsoft's legal woes not quite over & hellip;. and more.
309130
The Office of Fair Trading says the elderly and vulnerable are being targeted by an array of increasingly sophisticated scams that are ripping consumers off to the tune of Â£3.5bn a year.
288348
Italian authorities are bringing charges in a scam involving fraudulent e-mail to bank customers.
339030
Ghana's greed A Nigerian national who had been living in Canada was taken into custody by Winnipeg police in connection with a West African email scam alleged to have bilked an 84-year old man of $30,000.â¦
444469
By TOM BODDEN Welsh Affairs Correspondent  BARGAIN hunters in North Wales were warned yesterday to beware of "unbelievable offers".   Scams ranging from bogus holiday clubs to dodgy sweepstakes, miracle cures to fake foreign lotteries, are aiming to catch the unwary.