Good morning, Fraud Fighters ✋ 

Kids are headed back to school, and conference season is right around the corner. Hope you're headed to some good ones this year.

Let’s check out the top stories this week in fraud.

Fraud News Roundup 🗞️ 

• 273 Fraudulent ACH Payments - An Alabama Banker stole over $2 million from her employer, First Community Bank, by making fraudulent ACH payments. Read More

• Chase AI revelation - Chase expects to cut fraud headcount by 10% with AI and automation, even as fraud attacks grow 12% year over year at the bank. Check out page 12 in their investor day transcript. Read More

• Uber Drivers Save The Day - Uber’s Global Security Team alerted the FBI to a scam impacting hundreds of elderly people. Read More

• New Risk Evolves for Merchants - AI Agents may completely change the way e-commerce merchants have to manage their rules and strategies. Read More

• From Mail Route to Rolex - A Postal employee turned her mail route into a million-dollar bonanza and flaunted her tropical vacations online. Read More

• Bank Fraud Turns Into Circus - A high school student and a man wearing a wig pretending to be 90 were arrested by police for a fake check, but not before the whole thing turned into a circus with the whole family showing up. Watch It

• TechCrunch Espionage Scam - Scammers are impersonating TechCrunch reporters to contact companies, stealing proprietary trade secrets during interviews. Make sure your marketing departments are aware! Read More

• Russian Hackers Lurking - Security experts say Russian Hackers lurked in court system for years and stole confidential cases. Many suspect they are also responsible for latest big court breach. Read More

• What in the hell, Meta?? - Meta is coming under fire for having a policy that allowed their AI chatbots to “flirt and engage in romantic roleplay with children.” The document outlined that it “would be acceptable for a bot to tell a shirtless eight-year-old that ‘every inch of you is a masterpiece – a treasure I cherish deeply.” Read More

• 550,000 Fake License Plates - An illegal alien was ordered to pay $22 million and spend 5 years in prison for running a massive fake license plate scheme in Texas. It is unlikely he will be able to pay since he will be deported after his sentence is served. Read More

• Ridiculous Address Fraud Fine - NeoBank Monzo was fined $21 million for having controls so lax that fraudsters could open bank accounts using Buckingham Palace’s address or even the bank’s own headquarters. Read More

• The New Mortgage Fraud Trend - Mortgage fraud appears to be politicians' Achilles heel, as three separate investigations are underway involving both Democratic and Republican targets. I predict we will see more of these as AI identifies the red flags. Read More

• “EDR Killers” - Ransomware couldn't care less about your endpoint security. They have discovered how to disable security software from Microsoft, Symantec, Sophos, and Trend Micro. This trend is spreading fast causing companies to rethink their strategies. Read More

• Bad Stuff - A new malware that drains people’s credit cards, while simultaneously forwarding OTP codes from the banks directly to the fraudsters, is proliferating through Brazil in apps called “Card Protection”. Read More

• US Sanctions Cartel Timeshare Co’s - 13 companies in Mexico have been sanctioned for ripping of American’s through timeshare fraud schemes. Read More

• Sextortion AI Modified Videos - Scammers are resorting to AI to modify video calls they had with victims to show the victim doing inappropriate things that never happened. Read More

• Zelle Can’t Catch Break - New York sues Zelle for “rampant fraud” but Zelle calls it a “political stunt” just to generate press. Read More

• Pump and Dump Soaring - Investors are losing billions as pump and dump scams multiply over the last 30 days. Read More

• They even accessed her printer - A woman lost $17,500 in a bizarre bank impersonation scam where her the scammers printed bank letters from her computer and had a courier pick up money from her home. Read More

Again Miami! Bust Out Breakdown

Police, car dealerships, and lenders in Miami are in overdrive trying to break up the South Beach Bust Out Syndicate.

This guy had financed 6 cars in three days across multiple lenders with cars ranging from $60k to $80k each!

Read More

Fraud Scans And Balance Checks Are Taxing Chase Systems.

Of the 1.89 billion API calls that Chase processes a month for Open Banking platforms, only 13% are initiated by the customer. In the case of Plaid, it’s only 6%.

Chase claims that the heavy traffic is for fraud scan services, or harvesting data for them to sell to other companies, and they want Plaid and others to pay up.

It could get extremely costly - about $300 million a year. If Plaid pays, those costs could get passed on to customers in the form of higher API fees.

PNC Sues Tech Founder For Alleged $27 Million Bust Out Check Kiting Fraud

PNC says that one of their customers, a prominent tech-founder, deposited 81 bad checks totaling $87 million and then sent over $336 million in wire transfers to other banks. This is a whopper of a bust-out fraud.

The bank is taking matters into its own hands and suing him to freeze his assets, including a $12 million condo he bought in Manhattan.

Read More

Massive US Tow Truck Scam Exposed On A Crashed Zoom Call

This is messed up. 👇️ Its similar to those airline scams that are sprouting up everywhere.

A company called Safer Road Rescue operates out of Texas, creating fake Google listings that impersonate local towing companies across America.

They charge desperate and stranded drivers three to four times standard rates and exploit overseas workers in Philippines, Nigeria and Kenya paying them $2.20 an hour and they operate their business on Zoom calls.

Watch this fascinating exposé on how they operate as YouTuber Pleasant Green crashes their meeting and reveals how they scam their victims.

Founder Blew $4 Million In Investors’ Money In 6 Days Then Created Cover Story

A tech founder and former Goldman Sachs executive raised $4 million from investors to create a gambling app.

When he got the money, it burned a hole in his pocket, and he gambled it all away within days. He initially blamed it on a “phishing attempt” and some bad Bitcoin investment, but the truth was later revealed.

Read More

Held At Gunpoint. This AI Scam Was Sheer Terror 🔫 

A new wrinkle in terror scams as fraudsters use voice clones to make people think their relative is being held at gunpoint.

In this case, the fraudster called multiple family members using the same AI voice of their sister making them believe he was going to shoot her if they didn’t pay.

Watch It

Can You Sleuths Figure Out This United Airlines Scam Mystery? 🤔 

A man called United Airlines’ toll-free line to rebook his tickets to Europe. The marathon 3-hour call resulted in them changing his reservations and billing him $17,000 for new tickets, with a promise to refund the original tickets.

The only problem? United says he was scammed and that he wasn’t talking to them, but a scam company.

United admits their call log show he called in, but that he dropped after 13 minutes.

Some suspect a collusive agent was involved. What do you think happened?

Watch It

Ignore Those Toll Texts! Wait, Don’t Ignore Them!

Ashley did what everyone does - faithfully deleting the deluge of toll text messages that hit her phone every day.

“I assumed it was a scam and so I just kept deleting them because I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not going to fall for that, I’m too smart to fall for that”

Weeks later she was surprised to learn the text weren’t a scam at all and she almost landed herself in hot water.

Read More

Well, that’s about it this week. Thanks for reading the newsletter and please forward to anyone else you think might be interested in keeping up with fraud and scams.

FrankonFraud