Greetings, Fraud Fighters 🤖 ,

It’s the summer of breaches. This week, it was the stunning AT&T Breach, which involved call and text logs from 127 million customers. If you do the math, that’s 33% of the US population.

Well, AT&T now says that they paid the hackers $370,000 to delete the data and that there is video proof it was deleted. I don’t know, do you trust hackers? 🤷 I don’t!

Let’s get to the top stories this week.

• Bye OTP 👋 - In a sign of the times, Singapore banks are shutting off OTP and opting for digital tokens activated through the customer’s mobile devices. Up to 90% of bank customers in the country have already activated their tokens Is it only a matter of time before US banks follow suit?

• Slack Attack—1.1 Terabytes of Disney’s Internal Slack channel data, including upcoming projects, movies, and personal employee logins, were reportedly hacked.

• Avalanche—The Snowflake breach continues to snowball into the largest breach in history as ATT reveals that the breached data was stolen from their platform's databases.

• Extra Extra CheapFake - It’s hard to believe this cheap fake worked, but a French lady believes this Yahoo Boy who is playing a video with the sound off and moving it back and forth while he talks to her.

• Rags To Riches - Priscila Barbosa came to the US with nothing, but within months, she created a scheme to use synthetic identities to bilk ride-sharing companies out of $1.4 Million.

• CDK Paid Hackers - CDK paid hackers $25 million as ransom to get their systems back up and running.

• Tether Crackdown - Tether has frozen over $28 million in Pig Butchering scam funds from shady player HuionePay after they were exposed by Elliptic last week - a group that I highlighted on my blog recently.

• Synthetic Identity Lawyer—A disbarred attorney used synthetic identities, creating aliases and using stolen social security numbers, to get various positions with various law firms with his ghost identities. He is set to serve 37 months in prison.

• “Rock in Salad Scam” - I guess this is a thing, but this lady tried to get $8k from a restaurant, but things fell apart when the cops arrived. Watch here

Huione Guarantee - The Walmart of Pig Butchering

Researchers at Elliptic uncovered the vast Chinese-language digital bazaar known as Huione Guarantee. The sprawling online marketplace operates through a labyrinth of Telegram Channels, each run by individual merchants.

The platform has everything for Pig Butchering Scam centers, including Torture Devices, Deepfake AI tools, Telecom data to run the call centers, money laundering services, and creating fake crypto websites that look real.

Shockingly, Huione Guarantee has ties to the highest levels of the Cambodian government, revealing that Pig Butchering operations have a safe harbor in the country.

Click Here Or Image Below To Read

Scammer Puts Hit Out On His Pig Butchering Rival

Xiao Wei better keep his head on a swivel because he’s got a hit out on his head for 30,000U (about $4,100 USD). Apparently, he’s been recruiting workers from Myanmar and shuttling them to Cambodia for his own scam ops.

In this simply remarkable post from Gary Warner this week, we see that Pig Butchers are unrestrained in their violence and cruelty, operating just like the mafia but perhaps even more violent.

“Mixed in with the buying and selling of women for sex and the abusing of the scammers are death threats and hits against their peers”, says Warner.

FotoDropy - The Face Factory To Help Fraudsters ByPass KYC Controls

It's called FotoDropy, and you can think of it as a face factory for stand-ins that help fraudsters bypass KYC controls. You can check out the website by clicking here.

The store, which was highlighted by 404Media, sells packages of 80 photos and 4 videos of the same person against white backgrounds (and often holding driver’s licenses or passports). The files are delivered as Photoshop files so they can be manipulated by the purchaser.

Fraudsters can use those packages to create fake identities and use images and videos to bypass the standard driver’s license and selfie checks during the application process.

How do they get those pictures and videos? According to David Maimon, “They go to places like Serbia, and they give 20 bucks—even 5 bucks in some cases—to people there just to take a selfie and video of themselves. Then they offer those sets for sale,” he says.

I spent $15 in Bitcoin and was delivered 40 photos of a white male in various poses holding blank documents and pieces of paper that can be photoshopped with fake documents, passports, and driver’s licenses. You can check out the files they sent me here.

Crazy stuff.

SBA Employee Who Doubled As Credit Repair Guru Helped Herself To $$$

A credit repair guru and real estate agent who doubled as an SBA employee jumped on the fraud bandwagon and helped her associates free government money.

Chapman worked for the SBA as a disaster relief specialist and used forged documentation to get herself a PPP loan for her credit repair company, Upscale Credit Lounge. She even took out a loan for an “Infant Clothing” business with no online presence.

She then helped six more people do it, too.

After the PPP scheme, she then targeted the COVID rental assistance program in Miami, providing forged docs to collect $15,000.

I guess we can now say that everyone, even their own employees, was defrauding the SBA during the pandemic.

Amazon Legal Hits Job Scammers With Lawsuit, Lands $1 Million Judgement

Amazon continues to use the legal system to sue scammers and fraudsters that exploit them, and this week, it secured a massive judgment against Roy Oron, who ran a sophisticated work-from-home scam.

At the scheme's heart, Roy Oron deployed robo-dialers to call victims to direct them to sites with Jeff Bezos image, saying, “We need your help!” and promising to pay up to $14,000 a month for the victims to post product reviews. In the end, it was a sham and victims were enticed into paying enrollment fees for jobs the never materialized.

Read the story and lawsuit here

“Don’t Tell A Soul” - How Bad Cops Tried To Keep Fraud Scheme a Secret

A band of corrupt cops in Contra Costa County is under fire for a wide range of dastardly schemes, including steroid possession and distribution, accepting tequila as bribes to make traffic tickets go away, cheating on college courses, and violations of civil rights.

According to recently filed court papers, they stressed the need to keep secrets, not get a “loudmouth” officer involved, and limit the number of other police officers so they could control it.

Their fraud included getting “college degrees” to earn an additional $1,000 bump in their monthly salary.

Click here to read

A Credit Washing Mortgage Fraudster And His Synthetic Identity Girlfriend

It’s the hidden fraud most mortgage lenders don’t realize is happening - credit washing. However, a recent case reveals how exposed mortgage lenders are to this growing scheme.

Reynold Mullen and his girlfriend Tiffany Russell used ‘washed credit reports, ' fraudulently removing tradelines by claiming identity theft to hide bad debt and getting over $1.4 million in mortgages. They not only got mortgages, but they used stolen COVID funds to get plastic surgery like Brazilian Butt lifts.

It isn’t the first time Tiffany Russell has been involved in fraud, as she was accused of using CPNs to create synthetic identities and defrauding 12 different banks.

Click Here Or Image Below to Read

Hack A Code - The OTP Bot User Manual From PlugValley

Ever wondered how OTP Bots work? Well, you can just go to the user manuals, which are freely available on the open internet. This manual for PlugValley OTP bot shows scammers exactly how to get people’s OTP codes to hack into their bank accounts.

Click here to see it

Horror Show - Inside A Scam Farm With Party Rooms and Torture Chambers

The bosses lived like kings while they beat and tortured their trafficked victims who did not meet their scam quota for the day.

It’s hard to believe a place like this exists in the world, but check out this eye-opening video. It shows a behind-the-scenes look at a scam center that was recently shuttered by authorities in the Philippines.

Click to Watch

That’s a wrap for another weekly edition of FrankonFraud. I hope you have an amazing week ahead fighting fraud.

FrankonFraud