Happy New Year! 🥳 

My first post of the year, so you know what that means? It’s time for 2025 Predictions! Check out my blog below for what type of fraud we can expect this year.

Let’s get to the top stories this week.

This Week’s Fraud Highlights 

• Learn to Spell - A Colorado man is wanted for allegedly attempting to hold up a bank in a robbery that quickly went off the rails when the teller couldn’t read the note he handed over.

• Grift For The Ages—Hindenburg is accusing Carvana of a “grift for the ages.” They claim the owners are inflating the stock price through a dizzying array of account tricks. 

• 2024’s Big Cyber Events - Bleeping Computer published the ten biggest stories in cybersecurity of the year. It’s a good overview of what happened.

• Inside Sales: Rank-and-file bank workers are increasingly being caught selling clients’ data to scammers. Bloomberg covers this growing trend, which is impacting banks across the US.

• Biden Deepfake - Little-known Telecom Lingo has been fined $1 million for sending a Biden deepfake clone robocall to voters in New Hampshire last year.

• The Big Exit - PayPal’s Honey users are leaving in droves after being exposed for fraud by MoneyLag. Over 3,000,000 users have reportedly deleted the app in the last two weeks.

• Preferred Hacking Site - 404 Media reports that thousands of violent hackers are using UHaul to steal PII and then use that information to DOX their targets.

• Gamer to Fraudster - A 16-year-old kid got cheated when he was online playing Halo. Little did he know that event would lead him down a twisted path into a career in online cybercrime.

• Massive Corruption- A new exclusive report from CourtWatch details how postal employees took $2 million in bribes to help a trucking company win contracts.

A Big Collapse Of Trust And Fraud Predictions For 2025

It was one for the history books. As expected, 2024 was "Fraud At Full Throttle" as fraudsters upped their attacks.

But it was the breakneck speed of everchanging scams that surprised us most. Just when we thought they could not get worse, they did. And when we felt that AI deepfakes were years away, they happened.

Mary Ann Miller, Karisse Hendrick, and I spent weeks analyzing 2024 and drafting predictions for fraud we can expect in 2025. It will be a transformative year that could result in a complete breakdown of trust.

You, the fraud fighter, may be the only thing standing in the way of stopping that from happening.

Click To Read

Fake Mobile Bank App Is Helping People Defraud Lenders

Imagine if you made 1 million dollars a year. You could finance any car you want by showing your bank balance to the lender. Thanks to a new app, it’s now possible, even if you only make $10 a year.

Auto lenders and car dealerships are the primary targets of these new apps, which help borrowers fake deposit balances and even credit scores to get approved for loans they shouldn’t.

Click to Read

There Is A New Bot Called CPN Wizard That Automates Synthetic Identities

New software for sale on Telegram offers to help people automate using cpns. It’s called ‘CPN Wizard,” and it claims to do everything from choosing the best stolen social security number for some to use to automatically add a new identity to public records.

The software costs $250 for 30 days and $500 for a 90-day key, giving someone unlimited access to create as many synthetic identity profiles as they want.

Click to Read

Return Fraud Hits Record $103 Billion, Retailers Struggle To Contain It

Merchants are struggling to keep up with the influx of return fraud.

A new report released by Deloitte and Appriss suggests that fraudulent and abusive returns will cost a staggering $103 billion in 2024, which equates to about 15 percent of all customer refunds.

Click To Read

Binance Scam Interdiction Team Saved Victims Over $130 Million Last Year

A Binance blog post is shedding light on how their anti-scam team helped stopped over $130 million from being stolen from their customers.

The report highlights their “2024 Anti-Scam Refund Initiative,” which uses the classic Prevention, Detection, and Recovery approach most bank fraud programs use.

But it’s their novel 24-Hour Safety Net that I find most interesting.

Click to Read

37 Arrested in AI Model Deepfake Scam

Scammers in Hong Kong hired attractive young people to work as scammers and AI models for a deepfake scheme that targeted hundreds of victims across Southeast Asia.

“Recruits would be trained to use different dating apps to fish for targets, usually based in Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia,” the police said. “Scammers may have hired models to pose for deepfake videos as well, which would be combined with photos generated with AI technology,”

Click to Read

Car Dealers Are Battling Synthetic Identity Like Never Before

The problem of synthetic identity is getting so bad that some car dealers hire private investigators to help trace cars swiped off the lots.

“Dealers are getting hit left and right,” McKenna said. “COVID was training wheels for these fraudsters.”

Point Predictive estimated auto lenders faced $7.9 billion in losses from fraud and misrepresentation in 2023. Early 2024 data indicates another rise driven by higher rates of synthetic identity.

Click to Read

What Is A “Striker” and What Does “Super Dusty” Mean?

Fraud Fighter Eric Huber spends his nights and weekends pouring over thousands of fraud conversations on Telegram to understand precisely what they are discussing.

Over the years, he has built a “Fraud Glossary, which has become the industry standard for understanding their lingo. The glossary is now available online for you fraud fighters.

I highly recommend you bookmark this page!

Click to Read

New Report - AI Phishing Scams Are 350% More Effective Than Traditional Phishing

A new Harvard study has found that AI systems can conduct fully automated phishing campaigns as effectively as human experts. These systems generate emails that perform 350% better than traditional “spray and pray” phishing bot scams.

It is particularly troublesome that AI is 50 times more profitable for scammers.

Recruiter Identity Theft Scheme Is A New Goldmine For Phishers

Scammers are swiping the identities of real recruiters who work for actual companies and then impersonating them to pull off highly successful phishing schemes.

Victims are contacted via text, WhatsApp, and social media with remote job opportunities under the real recruiters’s identity. The scam works because it makes the job offers appear highly legitimate.

Click to Read

For 40 Hours, This Famous Indian YouTuber Was Under Digital Arrest

Digital Arrests are everywhere in India and now even hitting high-profile targets. This is a famous Indian YouTuber.

He was held hostage for a mind-bending 40 hours and isolated because he thought he was going to be wrongfully imprisoned for receiving drugs in the mail.

Click to Watch

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First Phone With AI Deepfake Detection Has Been Launched

The Honor Magic 7 phone marks a turning point in deepfakes. For the first time in history, a phone is being launched with a toggle switch, which a user can turn on to automatically detect a deepfake on any video call they are making from the phone.

Look to Apple to launch something like this soon, too.

Click to Watch

That’s it for another week of FrankonFraud. I hope this year is productive and happy for all you fraud fighters.

FrankonFraud