Bad Economy helps Cyber Crooks

2008-12-07

An article posted by Yahoo Tech contributes a rise in laundering money and stolen goods to the bad economy. It states that more and more people are willing to take risks with online scams as unemployment rises, saying "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." This is similar to the Nigerian 419 scams that promises to give the middle man a cut of the money transferred.

David Marcus, McAfee Inc.'s director of security research and communications, says "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."

The scams come in the form of an email advertisement for a job, with titles like "international sales representatives" and "shipping managers". Panda Security did a study that showed an increase of job related spam tripled in October from August and that the success rate in recruiting money mules rose to 1.8 percent, from 0.5 percent in August.

The article states that computer attacks in general have sharply increased in the past few months, with IBM stating that the number of daily attacks it spotted in Web servers and computer networks increased 30 percent over the past 4 months, to more than 2.5 billion attempted incursions worldwide. You can read the entire article for more information here.