Scams in the News (08/29/2009)

Today we have some feel-good news. A few of the stories making news today are about internet scammers getting caught.

Police nab Internet “fraud king” in France – Italian police said Friday that a man known through Europe as the “fraud king” had been arrested in France for swindling as much as euro500,000 ($718,000) out of tourists and other unsuspecting people through Internet scams.

Facebook ‘London’ Scam Picking Up In Intensity – Phishers Hack Into Compromised Accounts, Tell User’s Friends They’ve Been Robbed In London, Need Money Immediately. Hackers are logging into users’ accounts, but it’s actually not the hacked member who falls victim to the lucrative scam. It’s their friends. From news in the past, these hackers will target rich people. All this is made easy because the nature of Facebook is to share your information with others. Scammers will have an easy time selecting richer targets.

Internet scam busted up by police – An apparent Internet scam operation has been broken by the Calhoun Police Department. According to authorities, police discovered 44-year-old Shawn Jones using a city library computer for the alleged scheme. Calhoun Sergeant Doug Sorensen said Jones would purchase items from women off Craig’s List, and then send a check or money order for more than the purchase price. He would contact the seller and tell them he mistakenly wrote the check for more than the cost of the item and asked them to send him back the difference.

Charges laid in online dating scam (More women come forward in wine import case) – More women who became the alleged fraud victims of a man who met them on an online dating site have come forward after police released details last week of charges against an Ottawa man. On Aug. 19, police charged 49-year-old Angelo Morena with fraud over $5,000 and breach of probation after he allegedly developed a personal relationship with a woman through a dating site and convinced her to invest thousands of dollars in importing wine grapes from Italy and California. No such import operation existed, police said at the time.

Just some quote I saw today regarding Nigeria:

It’s so bad that children as young as 15 no longer go to school, but prefer to delve into Internet fraud. We arrest many of them weekly and in a particular case one of such children, who were arrested, used the name of his father to buy a car and his father was defending him till it dawned on him that he would go in for it instead of the boy.

Nigerian held for Kerala Net fraud – The Kerala police have arrested one more Nigerian youth accused of cheating people of millions of rupees in the notorious online advance-fee scam. Isi Tiffani Emmanuel, 34, is an associate of Shaba Abdul Razaue, who was arrested earlier this month. Both are part of a gang that sends e-mails to people promising them huge amounts or jobs and asks the victims to deposit an amount as transaction fee.

Trojan Could Enable Attackers To Eavesdrop On Skype Calls – The Trojan has the ability to record audio from the computer — including any Skype calls in progress — and store the files locally in an encrypted MP3 file, where they can later be transmitted to the attacker. The Trojan, which Symantec calls Trojan.Peskyspy, can be downloaded to a computer by tricking the user with an email scam or other social engineering tactic, Symantec says. Once a machine has been compromised, the threat can exploit an application that handles audio processing within a computer and save the call data as an MP3 file.

Is your child really in jail? – Similar to that of Facebook Used to Scam Grandparents, the scammers call saying that they are the person’s grandchild or child, who needs money to get out of jail. The caller asks for usually $3,000 to $5,000 to be wired in order to be released from incarceration and have the incident cleared off their record.