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Strange Stories in Fraud And Everyone's Building Deepfake Detectors Now

Author

Frank McKenna
February 27, 2024

Welcome to FrankonFraud.

There are some crazy oddball fraud reports this week. Plus, the FTC released their annual reporting, credit washing is on the rise, and everyone seems to be working on deepfake detection solutions. Sadly, many of the off-the-shelf solutions don’t seem to detect even the most basic deepfakes.

Let’s get to it.

2024 Consumer Sentinel Just Dropped - Is Credit Washing On The Rise?

The FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Fraud Report shows that reported fraud is pretty flat for 2023. That is until you examine one category- Credit Bureau and Info Reporters. This category encompasses disputes to the credit bureaus, which is way up - Over 400% since 2019.

To First Party Fraud Trackers, this is not a surprise; after all some shady credit repair companies are submitting tens and thousands of disputes a year to clear legitimate tradelines using identity theft and the FTC’s website and reporting.

FTC’s Interactive Fraud Dashboard

Check out the FTC’s interactive dashboard to get all of the stats you could dream of and download at your fingertips

Fraud Hunters Find Stash Of $6.9 Million In Thousands of Citibank Accounts

Seamus Hughes scours thousands of court filings daily, and he found an interesting filing that shows how investigators used big data to uncover a trove of $6.9 million in stolen funds that Citibank is holding in over 2,000 accounts until they can get an order to release it.

The accounts were uncovered using big data analysis to match suspicious unemployment claims to suspicious Citibank accounts.

The Big Fraud Stash

Millions On Hold in Citibank Accounts, most of the funds appear to be stolen from Arizona from unemployment benefit fraud

Inside Job - Truist Branch Manager Caught Up In Check Fraud

Macon GA Branch manager Nigar Scott helped herself to a customer’s account, writing a check for $89,000, which she deposited into her own account.

Insider fraud at bank branches has been on the uptick in the last year as check fraud losses have risen to historic highs.

8,000 Hijacked Domains Unleash Torrent of Phishing and Scam Attempts

Some of the biggest brand names, including MSN, VMware, McAfee, The Economist, Cornell University, CBS, Marvel, and eBay, are used for their trustworthy domains to bypass security filters for malicious emails.

Guardio detected the unprecedented attack, which they refer to as “Subdomailing”.

Mexican Cartels Find Fraud Is More Lucrative Than Drugs

Thousands of Americans are falling victim to Timeshare scams controlled by violent cartels in Mexico. The Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generation (CJNG) is spearheading this new wave of scams and stopping at nothing (including massacres) to make their money.

The cartels hire call center workers who speak perfect English, teach them how to scam Americans, and then hook them up to a dialer to pound the pavement.

The workers are taught to forge documents with names of companies, brokers, and attorneys that appear legitimate. Sometimes, they steal the identities of actual lawyers and even real estate agents and promise they are them.

The FBI claims this fraud is rising, with thousands of new reports each year.

Guy Pays To Have Someone Chop Off Legs For Insurance Fraud Claim 🫢 

This guy’s fraud claim doesn’t have a leg to stand on. 👉️ A man in Missouri paid someone to cut off his legs with a hatchet and then staged a horrific tractor accident to file an insurance claim.

Police were called to the gruesome scene when they received reports of a man losing his legs in a “Brush Hog” accident (which is like a huge lawnmower). They became suspicious however because his legs were nowhere to be found - they were gone. And the wounds appeared to be too clean to be an accident with a lawnmower.

They later learned that the guy was a paraplegic and could not walk, so he devised a scheme to have someone chop off his legs so he could collect insurance money.

Guy Used $78 Million Fraud Check To Buy Porsche

Connor Litkin is a guy who doesn’t like to take no for an answer. When the car dealership refused to accept his $78-million dollar check to buy a new Porsche, he walked to the back of the dealership to look for the keys to steal it anyway.

Doesn’t this remind you of the guy who tried to cash a $368 billion check to build his 80 million square foot underwater restaurant that could seat 30 million people at the same time?

Needless to say, he was arrested on the spot.

Man arrested trying to buy Porsche with $78 million check

Police were called on Wednesday to the St. Matthews Porsche Dealership.

Ethical Hacker Exploited Pay.Gov And Got Cars For a Buck

Auction sites are a great way to get screaming deals, but Evan James Coker took it to the next level.

Coker who claims to be a “certified ethical hacker” but he managed to find a loophole in the auction process and he used it to his advantage.

As part of the scam, Coker bid in multiple auctions for vehicles and jewelry on the GSA Auctions website. When Coker won a particular auction, he was directed to the pay.gov website to remit payment in the amount of his winning bid. Instead of remitting payment in the amount of his winning bid, Coker breached the pay.gov website and falsified the true auction price to $1.

Some speculate that he used a simple trick which involves using the “Inspect Element” functionality in the browser to change the price to $1 on the client side.

In total, Coker bid on and won 19 auction items and fraudulently paid just $1 for each item including a 2010 Ford Escape, a Ford F550 pickup truck, and a Chevrolet C4500.

Ethical Hacker Gets Cars For $1

The method employed isn't clear, but the result was a $3 bill for three running cars

Give Me Your Phone! Give Me Your Phone!

Watch this dramatic video as a daughter tries desperately to get the phone from her mother who is being scammed in realtime. This is playing out all of the country right now as billions is being stolen from our most vulnerable people.

There is a GoFundMe that has been setup to help her get her life savings back.

Bizzaro World - Magician Got Paid $250 To Make The Biden Deepfake

Magician Paul Carpenter has come forward claiming that he was paid $150 to create the deepfake of Joe Biden that was used to convince voters not to turn out in a recent local election.

He reportedly used ElevenLabs, according to research by PinDrop.

Researchers Claim This Is the Most Accurate DeepFake Detector, But Is It?

A new research report that studied almost every deepfake detector available determined that this online tool - Deepware.AI had the most accurate results in testing with over 99% accuracy.

I uploaded my HeyGen deepfake clone that was created in 5 minutes for a few dollars which you can find here and decided to test it.

Sigh… it said that there was almost zero chance it was a fake.

Give it a try yourself by uploading a video and see how it does - Deepware.AI

Thanks for reading, have a fantastic week fraud fighters.

FrankonFraud