Hello, my friends 👋 

Who is headed to the RSA Conference in San Francisco or the ACFE Conference in Ohio this week? Everyone? That is what I thought. I’ll keep an eye out for you. 👀.

Let’s get to the top news this week! 📰 

• Fraud Breakout - Shore United Bank reported their online credit card application portal was attacked over a seven-day period in March, resulting in over $4.3 million in fraud, impacting their earnings this quarter.

• Bank President Fraud—The President of Ericson State Bank, a small Nebraskan bank, committed internal fraud at such a scale that it toppled the bank forever.

• Billion Dollar Biocatch - BioCatch is now valued at over $1.3 billion after a blockbuster deal by Permira, who acquired a majority stake.

• Canned Food - The New York Times reports that skimmers are stealing millions in food stamp benefits from the poorest people in the country, forcing many to eat canned food for weeks.

• Story Just Gets Weirder - The dead man who was wheeled into the bank by his niece to co-sign for a loan may have been poisoned. He was dead for hours before she brought him into the bank. More unbelievably however is the fact his niece now claims that she thought he was alive when they went to the bank, saying it was his idea in the first place. She blames sleeping pills on her altered state.

• Harrowing Kidnap Scam - A Chinese student fled to Australia to escape prosecution after being urged to do so by impersonation scammers. They were attempting to isolate her and collect $200k from her family.

• Zelle Heat Up—Both Wells Fargo and Chase have reported in SEC filings that they are responding to government authorities regarding their handling of Zelle disputes.

• Scammers New Target - Scammers are targeting class action lawsuits, filing 3.3 million claims for car seats for example when only 875,000 were made.

• AI Crash Photos - Fraudsters are reportedly using shallowfakes to edit or dummy up photos to enhance the damage to their cars to get a bigger insurance check when they get in a fender bender. Insurance co’s say the fraud is up 300% last year.

• Buffet Bombshell - Warren Buffet says that AI might be better for scammers than for humanity, warning that AI scamming is going to become a huge growth industry.

• Detect Digital Doppelganger’s - Elevenlabs, the leading deepfake audio cloning company says “digital watermarks” are the only solution to stopping the cloning, but it will require collaboration between companies and the government.

BlueSnap Ignored Their Director Of Fraud, Then Things Took a Turn For The Worse

Always listen to your Fraud Manager.

One company, BlueSnap, learned that lesson the hard way. When their Director of Fraud warned the CEO in 2021 that a big customer was engaging in fraud, the CEO ignored him and said it was an important client they needed to take care of.

Click to Read

DeepFake Clones Can’t Cry. So Why Do All These Scam Attempts Report They Do?

Something strange occurred to me the other day. I have read many articles about Voice Clone kidnapping scams. In each case, the victim (often a parent) claims that they received a deepfake call from their child who was crying.

There is only one problem with that. I have never found a voice cloning service to make a deepfake cry. The voices cannot express any emotion. In fact, for the most part, they are very monotone.

Click to Read

Catfished - First Use of AI Deepfakes Being Used By Pig Butcherers Now

Is that romance scammer real? Or is it AI? Catfished, the show that investigates romance scams every week has come across their first use of true deepfakes in Pig Butchering operations.

They believe the model and all of the videos were complete deepfakes.

Click to Read

Scammers Use Spoofed Bank Portals To Lure Victims

For years, scammers have used fake crypto apps to foll victims, but now they are using fake bank accounts designed to look like major US banks.

Romance scammers are resorting to create fake bank portals with names like Bncdigitaltruist.com to fool the victims into thinking they have millions of dollars in it before they start asking them for money.

The sites are designed to look like legitimate US banks and the scammers will also use the account to have the victims wire transfer them money.

A Few Extra Bucks - “Just Give Me Your Debit Card” Then Claim You Were Hacked

Their ads were all over Instagram, giving people a nice side hustle and way to make a few extra bucks. “ALL BANKS WELCOME PICKING UP CARDS TAP IN”.

The catch? People had to turn over their debit cards so the fraudsters could deposit stolen checks in their accounts.

After the fraud was completed and the banks restricted the accounts, the fraudsters instructed the mules to file a false claim and advised their debit cards were lost and their accounts were hacked!

Click to Read

The Package King of Miami - The #1 Professional Refunder

At 21, Matthew Bergwall was a gifted coder who could have gotten a job at any tech company. He decided to go in another direction and became a gifted professional refunder.

Click to Read

Meta Vendetta? Why Did They Hire Expert To Help Them, Then Rescind The Offer?

Paul Raffile exposed how cybercriminals were using a vast network of fake Instagram accounts to blackmail tens of thousands of teens with sextortion schemes, driving dozens of victims to suicide.

So Meta hired him to help them. Before he started however, they rescinded the offer, presumably out of retaliation. Paul’s post on LinkedIn went viral garnering over 25,000 comments, likes and repost.

Many speculate Meta’s hiring was nothing more than window dressing after Zuckerburg’s disastrous apology in front of Congress and they had no intention of fixing the issue.

What do you think of this? Will Meta ever get a handle on this problem if they do things like this?

Fraudology - Innocent People Being Conned Into Becoming Fraudsters

I joined Karisse to talk about how innocent people are being conned into becoming outright fraudsters. From FEMA impersonators exploiting disaster victims to the sinister growth of CPN (Credit Privacy Number) schemes where stolen Social Security numbers are sold under the guise of building new credit profiles.

Click to Listen

Crypto Address Poisoning - You Won’t Believe This Fraud

A guy lost $70 million in Etherium through a very sophisticated but remarkably simple scam. He was going to transfer his entire holdings of $70 million to a new wallet. While he was doing a test transaction to the new account to make sure it worked, a scammer inserted a tiny transaction into his account with a crypto address that looked almost identical to his new account.

When he went to back to send the full amount, he inadvertently selected the scammers address since it was on the top of his historical transactions. And just like that $70 million vanished

Click to Read

Watch TV Technician Cut TV On Hidden Camera To Avoid Paying A Warranty Claim

A guy catches an authorized TV Technician on hidden camera purposely cut his TV screen to avoid paying a warranty claim.

The video went viral on Reddit but the TV company - one of the biggest in the world - doesn’t want anyone to see this video so they have been successful in keeping it off social media

New Podcast Just Dropped - Banking On Fraudology 🔥 

Hailey Windham has teamed up with Karisse Hendrik’s #1 Fraud Podcast - Fraudology, to dish on all things banking fraud. While Hendrik has focused on and built a massive following in merchant and retail fraud, Hailey will focus on banking. Check it out!

Click to listen

That’s all I have this week. Thanks for staying on top of all the latest stories and trends in fraud.

Have an amazing, fun, and fraud-fighting-filled week.

FrankonFraud