Bad economy helping Web scammers recruit ‘mules’

By Jordan Robertson, The Associated Press, December 9, 2008

SAN JOSE, Calif. -

The worsening economy appears to be helping computer crooks with one of their toughest tasks: tricking people into opening their homes and bank accounts and becoming “mules” for laundering money or stolen goods.

The scams themselves aren’t new. They’re pitched in spam e-mails as “work-at-home” jobs that promise excellent part-time money for helping companies pay clients in other countries. The victims are asked to open new bank accounts in their names, agree to accept anonymous payments into those accounts, and forward those payments by way of money transfer, usually to locations in Eastern Europe.

The scam is classic money laundering with an Internet twist. The money is generally real, and the middle man is promised a cut. What those middle men may not know is they’re trafficking in ill-gotten gains and helping criminals pay each other while disguising the source. And the mules are often the ones at the greatest risk of arrest.

Savvy computer users usually identify this as a scam. But security researchers say more people are willing to take a risk on the come-ons as unemployment rises and the volume of the mule e-mails increases.

“When people are scared of a job going away, or they’re worried about having money to pay bills, they might look at something like this in a different light than when things are rosy and great,” said David Marcus, McAfee Inc.’s director of security research and communications. Read the rest…

As Robertson mentions this isn’t a new scam it been going for quite a while now. Unfortunately as the economy worsens more people a willing to respond to these types of come-ons.

The bottom line is pretty simple: if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.

For more information on internet fraud and scams check out Looks Too Good To Be True.com. They have a wealth of information on various types of fraud and alerts on new scams.

Other Resources:

• Internet Crime Complaint Center
• United States Postal Inspection Service
• Federal Trade Commission

Host of Internet Spam Groups is Cut Off

Spam Drops After Internet Providers Disconnect a California Hosting Firm

By Brian Krebs
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 12, 2008; 7:16 PM

The volume of junk e-mail sent worldwide dropped drastically today after a Web hosting firm identified by the computer security community as a major host of organizations allegedy engaged in spam activity was taken offline, according to security firms that monitor spam distribution online.

While its gleaming, state-of-the-art, 30-story office tower in downtown San Jose, Calif., hardly looks like the staging ground for what could be called a full-scale cyber crime offensive, security experts have found that a relatively small firm at that location is home to servers that serve as a gateway for a significant portion of the world’s junk e-mail.

The servers are operated by McColo Corp., which these experts say has emerged as a major U.S. hosting service for international firms and syndicates that are involved in everything from the remote management of millions of compromised computers to the sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and designer goods, fake security products and child pornography via email.

But the company’s web site was not accessible today, when two Internet providers cut off MoColo’s connectivity to the Internet, security experts said. Immediately after McColo was unplugged, security companies charted a precipitous drop in spam volumes worldwide. E-mail security firm IronPort said spam levels fell by roughly 66 percent as of Tuesday evening.

Spamcop.net, another spam watch dog, found a similar decline, from about 40 spam e-mails per second to around 10 per second. Read the rest…

Score one for the good guys… Of course I’m sure we’ll all miss those ads for male enhancement products in our inbox…

I’m not really surprised that talks between the two companies broke down or that Microsoft withdrew its acquisition offer. The deal never made sense to me and to be honest I never thought it would close so I really wasn’t surprised when the negotiations fell apart.

That’s pretty much it… No surprises anywhere, not in the deal falling apart and not in Wall Streets reaction to the news.

Anyway how about them Yankees?