SCAM Alert: Puppy Scams & Business Executive Scams

NEVER send money or give credit card or online account details to anyone you do not know and trust.

Almost everyone will be approached by a scammer at some stage. Some scams are very easy to spot while other scams may appear to be genuine offers or bargains. Scams can even take place without you doing anything at all.

Two scams have been identified prominent and needs awareness are:

(1) The “Puppy Scam” which is aimed at the dog lover, has been around for many years and appears to be rising again.

(2) The “Business Executive Scam” looks to victimize businesses in both Canada and the United States of America.

The Puppy Scam Method of Solicitation: Purebred dogs are offered at lower than normal prices. Straight forward ads are placed in free on-line sales sites like Gumtree, Craigslist and community web pages. The use of standard Newspapers ads has also been identified.

A twist to the scam also sees the seller leaving countries to do a ‘Christian Mission’ in other country. They must sell their dog because of their commitment to this mission where they will be helping people less fortunate. Although mobile phones have been used mainly the communication is done through an email address.

Victim Remittances: The use of money service businesses (MSB) is the primary method the fraudster uses to collect victim funds. Once the price is confirmed and the original payment is made the victim can expect many more communications from the fraudsters because the victim has to pay the “certified Transportation Company”, the “out of country tax”, the “Anti-terrorist fee” or the “verification of vaccination fee” just to name a few.

Additional emails will follow until the complainant finally realizes they are a victim and will never get a dog. Most of the destinations of the MSB transfers are West African nations including Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon.

Refer here and here for more information.

The Business Executive Scam Fraudsters are researching companies on-line via company websites. To make this scam work, the fraudsters need to identify a company executive (IE CEO, President, manager, owner) as well as an email address to the accounting department. Once identified the fraudster creates an email address using the free emails of Yahoo, MSN or Google. The email address will be for instance “The executives name@ Yahoo.com”.

A message will be emailed to the accounting department advising that the executive is working at home or off-site and the executive has identified an outstanding payment that needs to be made ASAP.

The Executive instructs that a payment be made, generally in the amount of 25,000 to 80,000 dollars to an identified person and bank account.

Bank accounts associated to this fraud have been identified across North America thanks to the efforts of the complainants and the banks. Currently the victimization rate is very low but it has the potential for high dollar loss. Identified bank accounts require prompt action.

Refer here to learn more types of Business Executive Scams.

Security audit finds Developer OUTSOURCED his JOB to China

Pro-active Log Review Might Be A Good Idea

A security audit of a US critical infrastructure company last year revealed that its star developer had outsourced his own job to a Chinese subcontractor and was spending all his work time playing around on the internet.

The firm's telecommunications supplier Verizon was called in after the company set up a basic VPN system with two-factor authentication so staff could work at home. The VPN traffic logs showed a regular series of logins to the company's main server from Shenyang, China, using the credentials of the firm's top programmer, "Bob".

"The company's IT personnel were sure that the issue had to do with some kind of zero day malware that was able to initiate VPN connections from Bob's desktop workstation via external proxy and then route that VPN traffic to China, only to be routed back to their concentrator," said Verizon. "Yes, it is a bit of a convoluted theory, and like most convoluted theories, an incorrect one."

After getting permission to study Bob's computer habits, Verizon investigators found that he had hired a software consultancy in Shenyang to do his programming work for him, and had FedExed them his two-factor authentication token so they could log into his account. He was paying them a fifth of his six-figure salary to do the work and spent the rest of his time on other activities.

The analysis of his workstation found hundreds of PDF invoices from the Chinese contractors and determined that Bob's typical work day consisted of: 

9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos 

11:30 a.m. – Take lunch

1:00 p.m. – Ebay time

2:00-ish p.m – Facebook updates, LinkedIn 

4:30 p.m. – End-of-day update e-mail to management 

5:00 p.m. – Go home

The scheme worked very well for Bob. In his performance assessments by the firm's human resources department, he was the firm's top coder for many quarters and was considered expert in C, C++, Perl, Java, Ruby, PHP, and Python.

Further investigation found that the enterprising Bob had actually taken jobs with other firms and had outsourced that work too, netting him hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit as well as lots of time to hang around on internet messaging boards and checking for a new Detective Mittens video.

Bob is no longer employed by the firm. ®

Source from The Register

Refer here to read further details.