scam

An online scam scheme sends junk email messages telling people that a hotel has mistakenly charged their credit card with a wrong payment. The result of being victimized is an infected PC.

According to reports the messages appeared on the net in recent days and so far there are hundreds of versions already. The main theme is: A hotel wrongly charged a credit card number and the victim is supposed to fill out an attached form to process the refund.

In the course of an investigation police in the US and seven other states seized computers and servers used to run a "scareware" scheme which brought its masterminds more than $72 million from victims scammed into purchasing fake antivirus software.

In a Wednesday statement the US Justice Department said that 22 computers and servers were seized in the United States and 25 others in France, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Osama bin Laden’s death is widely used today by hackers to lure unwitting people into installing malware. The tricks work because people want to see the photos of a dead Al Qaeda leader, but the alleged pictures of bin Laden’s corps are in fact malicious, warned the FBI.

"It's not really surprising," said Mikko Hypponen, the chief research officer of Helsinki-based F-Secure. "We were expecting to see related malware."

Microsoft has issued a warning against phishing scam practiced by perpetrators over the company’s Xbox Live network. Meantime, Sony is struggling the consequences of a massive security breach reported this week.

The warning posted on the Xbox Live support page says that the phishing scam appears to be directed at those people playing "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" online:

JPMorgan Chase made more than $900 million in pretax profits from the Madoff scam according to the findings made in the course of the latest study of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Dr. Linus Wilson, a finance professor at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, published the paper where he uses newly released data and different methods of calculation than previous studies.

A new scam application was developed by cyber criminals to make mobile users send SMS messages to fraudsters’ premium short number. The application is disguised as an MMS service to send a Happy Valentines card to loved ones.

The malware comes as a downloadable file called "love_mms.rar" that includes a Java archive called "jimm2010.jar" and several Valentine’s Day themed pictures with Russian file names.

Scammers Marc D’Souza and his father, Maurice D’Souza, who operated an online “scareware” scheme, were ordered by the Federal Trade Commission to pay more than $8 million to settle charges of using deceptive ads to trick people into thinking their computers were infected with malicious software, and then sold them software to “fix” their non-existent problem.

The settlement was announced this week and the fine imposed on the defendant would be used to reimburse victims of the scam.

Scammers have hammered out a new scheme that may defraud unwitting people of big amounts of money. Now the scam is related to WikiLeaks. Victims who are supposed to be rich enough are called by an automated system that states their computer and IP address "had been noted as having visited the Wikileaks site, and that there were grave consequences for this, including a $250,000 or $25,000 fine, perhaps imprisonment".

Panicked marks are given a dedicated phone number to discuss payment terms if, certainly, these people are stupid enough to be deceived by the trick.

Companies are suffering high losses due to a scam scheme that targets businesses posting help-wanted ads online. Thus, it has already fleeced one company of $150,000, according to an advisory from the FBI that warns other businesses to be wary.

Online investors are raising woes over the problems with the HYIP industry giant Cherry Shares. The website can no longer be accessed and the withdrawals requested are not processed. On December 2 last week the website worked well while it was at that time the investors reported their withdrawals are pending for more time than required. Today the website is absolutely gone:

Phishing is thriving on the ignorance of the Internet users as half of the victims respond to the fraudulent emails within an hour of the receipt of scam messages, according to a study by transaction security firm Trusteer. Going further, the statistics shows that within 5 hours 80% of victims have responded with the figure raising up to 90% within the first 10 hours of an attack.

The statistics stresses the urgency for the fight against fraudulent websites that attempt to hoodwink the unwary into handing over online banking credentials or similar sensitive information.

This week the US District Judge Richard Holwell approved the use by prosecutors of wiretaps to investigate a fraudulent insider trading scheme supported by Galleon Group hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam. While the ruling does not specifically authorize wiretaps to investigate insider trading alone, it marks great victory for prosecutors who now can access secretly recorded conversations.

What cyber threats businesses and consumers should expect in 2011? This question was discussed by WebProNews with Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence Sr. Analyst at Symantec Hosted Services.

According to the data from net security firm Damballa western countries such as US, Germany and France occupy top positions in the botnent hosting charts. While China and Russia are known for their gangs that deal with hacking, spamming and cybercrime, these rank far below the western world as compiled by Damballa.

The report shows that for the first half of 2010, almost a quarter (23.9%) of botnet CnC servers were hosted by service providers in the US, followed by Germany with 17.9% and France with 8.6%.

A consumer protection website SiteJabber which is funded by the National Science Foundation posted a chart of common scams on World of Warcraft servers. Today the game is played by 11.5 million people worldwide and it is one of the most favorite havens for scammers, hackers and fraudsters who try to lure unwitting and unwary victims into their schemes so that they would give away their credentials or money.