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- Hacked, Locked, Ransomed: Instagram's Dark Underbelly Exposed 🔓
Hacked, Locked, Ransomed: Instagram's Dark Underbelly Exposed 🔓
Frank McKenna
August 06, 2024
Hello from FrankonFraud,
What are you doing this week? Do you want to attend an AboutFraud Webinar on AI? I will speak on a panel with Visa about how AI is supercharging advancements in fraud detection. Check it out here.
Ok! Let’s check out the top stories this week!
Massive BEC Recovery - A commodity firm in Singapore that fell victim to a $40 million BEC scam is breathing a sigh of relief after police recovered their money. It was a record-breaking recovery from a BEC scam.
TD Bank Accomplice - A bank teller in Florida is accused of working with fraudsters to cash checks they stole from the mail and washed. Believe me, there are many more cases like this happening all over he US.
No Free Lunch - An article in Bloomberg speculates that Zelle may not be free much longer. As banks are increasingly on the hook to reimburse victims, they will need a way to generate revenues from the free payment app.
Chase Counter-Strike? Chase processes 22% of all Zelle transactions and is considering suing the CFPB for not following the “bounds of the law.” The battle is heating up!
Oh boy - Three US Senators are proposing sweeping reimbursement changes for banks on Zelle and Wire Transfers, which could put banks' fraud and scam controls under enormous strain.
Derailed By Deepfakes - She was a rising political star, then internet trolls used her face to make deepfake porn, and it toppled her career. There was absolutely nothing she could do.
Scam City Under Seige - Go behind the scenes and learn about how the military raided the city of Laukkai, Myanmar, to free thousands of scam slaves held against their will.
OTP Bot—A big OTP platform called Russian Coms, which registered over 1.3 million calls, was taken down by UK Authorities. Two suspects were arrested in London.
Catch a Cheater—OpenAI has a tool to catch college students who cheat by using ChatGPT to write their term papers. However, the company has never released it because it is too controversial.
Hacked, Locked, and Ransomed. Instagram’s Dark Underbelly Exposed
Scammers love to brag, and it always leads to their downfall. That was the case with Idriss Qibaa, who ran a site called “Unlocked for Life.” His business model? Hack into the Instagram accounts of celebrities, lock the accounts down, and demand payment to unlock them.
He’s not the only one, but one of many professional extortionists who have perfected the art of social media ransom attacks.
He’d often go to great lengths to extort his victims, which he bragged about on the No Jumper Podcast in January. It was a fascinating podcast that revealed the shadowy underbelly of Instagram.
The FBI watched the podcast and then went after Qibaa and charged him and his crimes were revealed in newly released court documents.
Death By A Thousand Cuts - Inside A Wild Fake Merchant ACH Debit Scheme
A fraud ring created shell companies to establish fake merchants, bought customer lists from a data broker, and extracted millions of dollars from some of the largest banks in the US.
In what is being called a “Death by a Thousand Cuts” fraud scheme, the group issued fraudulent ACH transactions from consumers’ bank accounts for $38.65 and then disguised the fraudulent activity from their merchant processors by counterbalancing it with thousands of legitimate microtransactions worth $1.50 each.
Remote Customer Service Rep At Credit Union Turned To Inny Fraud
Aneicia Ford had a brief stint working as a remote customer service rep for a credit union in western Washington. While working from home, she also had a second hustle stealing customers' PII and handing it off to a scammer named Dangelo Roberts.
Roberts had recruited her and others off Instagram, where he would actively recruit bank insiders to help him access accounts. After Ford handed him customer details, he created debit cards and drained the bank accounts at the ATM.
Credit Union’s Fraud Alert Manager Charged With Fraud
Another one!
A former operations manager, who was responsible for Altana Credit Union's fraud alert process, used it to steal more than $60,000 from members and to conceal the evidence.
According to court documents, she processed customers' fraudulent spending claims to avoid detection and prevented many customers from filing police reports.
Because she was responsible for the fraud alert process, she could duplicate bank cards for customers' accounts and bring them home. She also took cards Altana received in the mail that couldn't be delivered to customers.
Fraud Investigators In Colorado Are The Best In Nation
71% of recoveries of fraud on PPP loans have been recovered from just a single state - Colorado. That’s right, of the $1.4 billion that has been clawed back, $1 billion of that comes from investigators out of Colorado.
Fake Employees And A DeepFake Zoom Call. What Could Go Wrong?
Caleb Keller devised a scheme he thought would be the perfect side hustle. As a developer working for a company, he created two fake employees through his side hustle business - Polyglot Developers, and submitted $1.2 million in invoices for their services.
When an alert company executive smelled a rat, he demanded to meet one of the employees on Zoom, and Keller showed up on the call using a deepfake filter to disguise himself as the fake employee.
That’s when things went bad quickly.
New Ads Reveal Emerging Identity Co-Signer Scheme
Here’s a new one. Scammers’ latest fraud as a service now includes synthetic identity co-signers to help consumers land that luxe car they always wanted.
For $500, a person can access a synthetic identity complete with a full documentation profile for use as a co-signer on auto applications. The profiles have 700+ FICO scores and will work at dealerships that accept “out-of-state” co-signers.
In some cases, they actually sell real stolen identities and provide counterfeit and forged docs to match the name. Watch those co-borrowers carefully these days.
What will they think of next? 🤔
The Apple Refund Scam - From Target Stores To The Streets of Hong Kong
Chalvin Tan initially came to the US to attend a wedding but later decided to extend his trip to engage in a life of crime.
Chalvin cooked up a scheme to purchase iPhones from Target, create genuine-looking counterfeits that matched the phones he had purchased, and then put the counterfeits in the box to return them. He shipped the real phones to Hong Kong, where they were sold on the streets.
He would have gotten away with it, but police pulled him over on a routine traffic stop where they discovered over 180 iPhones in his car. Better luck next time Chalvin! 👮
19 Million Fake Users, The SEC Is Charging This Founder in $170 Million Fraud
It’s a tale of massive greed by a tech founder willing to do whatever it took to enrich himself.
Abraham Shafi started a social media app called IRL and blew through $6 million in marketing to pay people to download his app. It worked, and millions of bots downloaded the app, sending it to the top of the App Store.
Using those inflated user numbers, he raised $175 million in funds, which he then used to pay himself a massive salary of $1 million a year, and he and his wife are accused of using company funds for lavish personal expenses.
Click to Read 👇️
The Silent and Most Deadly Ransomware Gang Operates in the Shadows
A group called Dark Angels made off with the largest ransomware bounty in history—over $75 million from Cencora.
However, unlike other attackers, they operate in stealth mode. They don’t want the limelight - that will just get them in trouble. Instead, they target the biggest companies in the world and make off with millions in bounty.
Read Kreb’s Article 👇️
BBC Reporter Targeted By Pig Butchering Scammer
A BBC reporter plays along with a Pig Butchering Scammer with an unexpected twist at the end of two months. While the scammer eventually admits to being a scam slave, they again try to turn the tables and get more money.
Job Fraud - Is This Where It Is Heading With AI?
This guy aces his coding interview without knowing how to code. AI is going to create lots of Job Fraud!
@kagehiromitsuyami I expect you to say something like that 👨🍳 #ai #jobinterview #microsoft #crowdstrike #azure #lifehack #magic #foryou #fyppppppppppppppppp... See more
To Be Clear, I Am Not A Super Model.
I’m not Cindy Crawford by any measure, but that is not stopping me from participating in the AboutFrauds “The Real Supermodels” webinar.
In 1997, I joined a company called HNC Software in San Diego. At the time, they were already using AI to fight credit card fraud, using tech developed for the military to find tanks in the desert 👉️ Read the blog about it here.
Since then, it has come a long way, with Visa now using Generative AI to stop compromise attacks, and Point Predictive using AI across lending channels
That’s a wrap for another weekly edition of FrankonFraud. I hope you have an amazing week ahead fighting fraud.
Thanks for all of your support in spreading the word on fraud. 🙏