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- Breaking: South Beach Fraud Ring Targets Auto Loans 🏝️
Breaking: South Beach Fraud Ring Targets Auto Loans 🏝️
Frank McKenna
March 04, 2025
Hi Fraud Fighters,
A humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Myanmar as 7,000 scam workers have been freed. Most of the scam workers are living in squalid conditions as the government tries to figure out how to repatriate them. Behind the scenes, scam bosses are shifting their tactics and staying on top. It’s a crazy situation in Myanmar right now.
Here are the top stories this week.
This Week’s Top Fraud Highlights
Members 1st - A fraud ring targeting the credit union’s members by pretending to be from the fraud department stole nearly $3 million from over 800 victims through various phishing schemes. It’s unclear how many banks were involved, but many victims were from the credit union. Read More
Fake Bank Statements Soar -According to a recent report from Inscribe Huntington Bank, Navy Fed, and Capital One are at the top of the list of the most preferred bank statements to manipulate, indicating that fake online templates have climbed over 50%. Read More
New Fraud As Service - For $3,000 you can buy a new Vin scrubbing service for your stolen car. The sand down the old one, touch up the paint, then engrave a new Vin making the stolen car ultra stealthy Read More
An AI Girlfriend Named Ms Jiao - A man in Shanghai lost nearly $28,000 after being tricked into a long-distance “relationship” with an AI-generated girlfriend. Scammers created deepfake videos and convinced him the money was for her new business venture. Read More
Wiggin Out - A woman wore 13 different wigs, pretending to be both men and women to take the Citizenship test for people in the UK fraudulently. Read More
Deepseek Scandal: Three men in Singapore are being charged with fraud for illegally funneling AI chips to Deepseek. This is probably the tip of the iceberg! Read More.
Struggling Platform - The UK’s new anti-fraud platform for consumer refunds has handled only 10 out of the 250,000 scam cases since its launch last October. Read More
What would you? - A Reddit user laments that their spouse secretly invested their entire life savings into a Pig Butchering scam, lost everything and borrowed heavily from relatives, leaving them penniless. Read More
From One Hell To Another: Scam Chaos In Myanmar
A coordinated crackdown among Thailand, Myanmar, and China has led to the unprecedented release of over 7,000 workers from online scam compounds.
While that sounds like great news, it often is not. China has treated all returning detainees as suspects, with state TV showing them marched off planes in handcuffs by police upon their return home.
And of the thousands that remain in horrible living conditions, they are stuck in purgatory, often not wanting to return to the compounds, or home where they will face consequences.
My Jaw Dropped. The First Voice Deepfakes That Sound 100% Real
There is a new voice deepfake tool that is blowing people’s minds because it pauses, laughs and thinks before it responds. When I first tried it with this demo here, it blew my mind.
In blind testing human evaluators could not tell the difference between real human recordings and seseme.
Got Gig Fraud? New Report Unmasks How Bad It Is
A GrubHub driver using a stolen identity delivers a pizza to a customer. The customer eats the pizza and calls GrubHub saying they never got it.
Fraud on delivery apps is soaring. A new report exposes a surge, with fake driver accounts constituting 57% of driver-side fraud and refund abuse accounting for 48% of consumer-side fraud.
Auto Lenders - Beware of Miami’s South Beach Bust-Out Syndicate
A sophisticated fraud ring known as the South Beach Bust Out Syndicate has orchestrated hundreds of fraudulent auto loans for high-value vehicles worth up to $100,000 each.
Their scheme recruits straw purchasers who apply for loans without intention of repayment, using inflated income figures averaging $284,000 and suspicious self-employed business credentials.
Fraud Fighter Scott Ellefson reports that the complex crimes the ring orchestrates after obtaining the cars make this a particularly problematic fraud scheme.
AI That Masks Accents Will Make Scam Calls Harder To Detect
Two years ago I received a call from “IRS agent” with a heavy accent and I could swear someone was washing dishes in the background. I could hear the dishes clinking in the background and kids crying.
A new AI masking tool called Sanas.AI just received a $13 million investment from Teleperformance, a company that outsources call centers to India for some of the largest companies in the world. Teleperformance plans to use the AI to make the agents sound “more local,” but fraud experts are worried that scammers running impersonation scam centers could co-opt this technology.
BlackMail Wave: Scammers Turn Victims Into Unwitting "News" Stars
Imagine waking up and a message with a screen of a CNN news article featuring you pops up on your phone. Your picture is featured and a big bold headline reveals that you have been caught defrauding students.
Nigerian fraud rings are crafting elaborate fake news stories featuring ordinary people's social media images, complete with "BREAKING NEWS" banners and shocking headlines about financial crimes they never committed.
Images like this are circulating on Yahoo Boy Channels showcasing that they are using this tactic to scam victims.
Amazon Warehouse Workers Turned Telegram Fraudsters Ordered To Pay $2.4 Million.
A federal judge has ordered four former Amazon employees and the leader of a fraud group called REKK to pay over $2.4 million for a massive refund scam they ran off Telegram.
A Lithuanian man identified as REKK's mastermind was ordered to pay $2 million alone. The group advertised "refund services" on Telegram, charging customers 30-35% of a product's cost to secure fraudulent refunds.
Palau ID Cards For $248 Help People in US Skirt Crypto Regulations
404Media reporter Joseph Cox discovered a loophole that allows US residents to buy ID cards from Palau for $248. The somewhat official-looking ID is available on this site.
With a Palau ID, U.S. traders can skirt crypto regulations and KYC controls.. The ID is so ripe for abuse that major cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance and Kraken have banned its use on their platforms.
Chase Rushed Into Scam - They Had 350 People On Due Diligence But Got Hoodwinked
JPMorgan Chase executives scrambled to acquire student-loan startup Frank because they thought another bank would get it. In court, a senior Chase official testified the bank wrongly believed Bank of America was bidding against them. In reality, Capital One was the bidder, offering $125 million for the company.
Despite deploying 350 people for due diligence, Chase still got hoodwinked. During the bank's three-week exclusivity period, Javice actually claimed they were on track to have 10 million customers, when in reality they only had 300,000.
MasterMind: 70 Ghost Students And $5 Million In Fraud
Cynthia Melvin built a large network of “Student Participants” who agreed to be ghost students who never attended college classes but collected big checks from the government.
No, she wasn’t the coolest teacher in the world, but the mastermind behind a massive ghost student scam that stole $5 million from the government.
Dark Web Vendors Selling Law Firm Access for Just $600
A U.S. law firm's entire network was recently found for sale on the dark web for only $600.
The troubling find was made by the Guardz Research Unit where they uncovered a growing underground marketplace where admin-level credentials, RDP access, and VPN logins for law and accounting firms are routinely sold.
Gun-to-Head Videos Net Scammer $126K in Ransom
Joshua Fernando sat on his knees, a masked Mafia man holding a gun to his head.
This was the scene depicted in a video that Fernando sent to his friends with dramatic pleas for money. He was on a business trip in Europe and had been kidnapped.
But it was all fake and nothing but a scam that worked beautifully, netting him over $126,000.
That wraps it up this week. Thanks for staying in tune and staying in touch.
Happy Fraud Hunting. 👨‍💻