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 Mean
Streets
by
Annie McGuire
Work at Home Payment Processing and Package
Processing Scams have become as popular as Lottery Scams, but with
more devastating effect.
Seldom do we hear from a Lottery Scam victim who has
been arrested. We frequently hear from Payment Processing Scam
victims who have been arrested.
Even at this late date, more than 3 years after the
onset of the scam, many local law enforcement investigators and
prosecutors remain ignorant of it's existence. In all cases,
the victim is either accused of being an active and willing
participant in the scam or of being the ringleader.
The scam, begun in late 2003, is an offshoot of the
ever-popular Nigerian Counterfeit Check Scam, aka Overpayment Scam.
It originated in the Former Soviet Union countries, notably the
Ukraine and Romania, and is now being practiced by Nigerian gangs
and possibly Asian gangs.
In the Payment / Package Processing scam, an
individual is "hired" by a non-existent foreign company - what we
call the "scamployer" - to accept payments and/or packages
from in-country residents, then forward the payments or packages to
various so-called employees of the foreign company.
Payments sent by Western Union or MoneyGram may be
addressed to a Former Soviet Union country or to Nigeria, and
occasionally to an address in the resident country. The wired
money may actually be picked up anywhere, not necessarily where it
was sent.
The monies sent to Asia are most often sent by
bank-to-bank wire to Japan. By the time the originating bank
tries to recapture the funds, the account on the other end has been
emptied.
The scam is very complicated and requires
international coordination between gang members in different
locations whose duties include recruiting work-at-homers (on and
offline), "running" the Payment Processing scam victim, setting up
fake eBay sales and running those victims, setting up Overpayment
scams and running those victims, setting up phony sales of all
kinds, in fact: any scheme in which money can be stolen from a
person and sent to the unwitting Payment Processing victim.
Then there are the connections that must be
established and maintained, such as with counterfeit, forged, stolen
and washed checks and money order suppliers, stolen credit card
suppliers, stolen banking information suppliers, and stolen ID
suppliers.
These are not the only scenarios. A lone
scammer may perform a variety of the functions described above,
including the direct creation of counterfeit materials or the
plundering of bank accounts or credit cards; but most often we see
evidence of multiple participants as uncovered by tracking the
emails received by the victim. Additionally, the coordination
of all the different elements contained in one single Payment
Processing Scam precludes the likelihood of a jack-of-all-trades.
In some instances, an intermediate money laundering
bank account, into which stolen funds are deposited then forwarded
to the Payment Processing victim, is created just for the purpose of
further separating the gang leaders from the source of the funds.
To date, we have yet to see a Payment Processing
victim who has the necessary connections to pull off one of these
scams, and email tracking reports clearly show the victim was being
lead along by gang members in foreign countries.
For a full history of the evolution of the Payment /
Package Processing Scam and how it works, download the Free White
Paper
HERE.
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Feature Article
Catching and stopping Nigerian and Romanian-style scammers.
Annie McGuire
The most disturbing questions we are asked are,
"How can I help you catch these guys?"
"Why isn't anything being done to stop this?"
"I want to set up a sting. Will you help me?"
Fraud Aid
doesn't go out and catch bad guys; we help the victims of investment frauds,
securities frauds, real estate scams, psychic scams, and many other types
of frauds, gather together the evidence they have in order to present it to
law enforcement in such a way as to make catching the bad guys easier.
Solitary
victims of Nigerian and Romanian-style scams seldom have the kind of
evidence required by local, state (province), or government enforcement
that justifies investigative expenses.
Law enforcement
is making arrests in Spain, The Netherlands, the UK, Nigeria,
Canada, and South Africa. More on that in a moment.
Setting up a
sting is not a simple thing like you see on TV, and is not for the
inexperienced and untrained. A sting can be dangerous and one wrong
word or wrong move can destroy the entire setup. More on that in a
moment, too.
First, let's
take a look at who is behind these scams and what they are doing.
The vast majority of Internet scams that involve the culling of victims to unwittingly
launder money come under the heading of Organized Crime.
And
well-organized it is.
A certain
segment of the Nigerian population has been perpetrating scams for
generations. It has become a culture, a way of life. Scam
methods are passed from family group to family group within a clan.
Normally, those
who head up the fraud rings are well-educated, having degrees from world
class universities in business, economics, and psychology, to name a few
of the subjects.
With the advent
of Internet email programs, Nigerian scammers were able to broaden their
hunt for victims from surface mail and in-person scams to impersonal global safaris.
Continued on Page 1, Column 2
Fraud in the News
Volkswagen Lottery Scam Running Rampant
Security Pronews - Lexington,KY,USA
A new scam is floating around the web waves and this one may tempt
a few people. "The Lottery Department" for Volkswagen Automobiles
has announced a new ...
Local man sentenced in fraud case
MaineToday.com - Portland,ME,USA
... man will serve 10 months in federal prison for bank and mail
fraud, according to US ... to the records of a credit card
company and made a wire transfer of $15,000 ...
Continued on Page 1, Column 2
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Continued from
Page 1, Column 1
Next we have
the Romanian gangs who latched on to the counterfeit check schemes devised
by the Nigerians and created their own money laundering based scams.
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The
Big Con
by David Maurer
The Big Con is the cornerstone
of the Fraud Aid library. It lays out the basics for every scam
ever devised.
In no time you'll recognize either a
Big Store or Small Store scam in any fishy deal, and smell it a mile
away.
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Within a scant
few months, the Romanians joined forces with the Nigerians, benefiting from
the vast international network of Nigerian scam families. In return,
the Nigerian gangs acquired access to a larger sourcing of Black Market
Databases for Identity Theft sales and purchases, computer hackers, and
malware developers.
Neither of
these forces has any compunction about financially destroying the lives of
their victims. They simply do not care. As far as they are
concerned, it's all the victim's fault for falling into their trap.
To make matters worse, Nigerian scammers are known to inflict great harm
on those victims who travel to Nigeria or South Africa in the form of
mugging, kidnapping for ransom, and murder.
Slowly but
surely, other gangs around the world are dipping their toes into the
same waters. It appears the Asians are getting involved, and there
have been a few attempts emanating from South America. It won't be
long before every organized crime gang on the planet arrives to feed from
this lucrative trough.
So what can
you, the recipient of their scam mails, the victim of their schemes, do to
help stem the tide?
When you
receive a counterfeit check, scan it and send it to the Federal Deposit
Insurance Corporation (FDIC) at
alert@fdic.gov. You can do this from any country.
Take the bad
check and money orders, along with the
envelope
they came in (regardless of the delivery service), to your nearest Post
Office, ATTN: US Postal Inspector. Be sure to write VOID across the
front of the drafts so everyone understands you're not trying to pass
them. If there is no Postal Inspector in your country, take them to
the police.
You can send
the individual emails, with Full Headers, to the Secret Service at
419fcd@usss.treas.gov.
As for stopping
these criminals, the difficulties are extreme. Law enforcement in
many countries is not interested in cooperating with that of other
countries to effect arrests. The most effective police force to date
is that of South Africa from which Nigerians run many of their letter
scams and lottery scams.
Arrests
While the US,
the UK, South Africa, and Canada exchange information, there is little
encouragement to do so: the expense of cross-border investigations is
staggeringly high and taxpayers are willing to pay only just so much to
support law enforcement.
In Eastern
Europe, Romanian law enforcement is doing what it can to keep a lid on the
resident fraud gangs, and it must be working: of late, most Payment
Processing Scams seem to be coming out of Latvia and Lithuania rather than
Romania.
Unfortunately,
that's part of the problem. Put the squeeze on the gangs in one
locale and they simply move to another. We tell people that nailing
down these gangs is harder than rounding up drug dealers - and 3 times as
expensive.
We also tell
people that these scammers are like smoke. Nothing they say is true
- not names, locations, titles, nothing. They use pre-paid throwaway
cell phones and mess around with email headers. They use every trick
in the book to remain elusive. They can be an investigative
nightmare, not impossible to track down, but very difficult and
time-consuming.
Undercover &
Stings
Those of you
who play games with them with the idea of gathering evidence for law
enforcement are putting yourselves at risk, not physically, but
financially. While you are baiting them from your open email IP,
they are sending spyware and Trojans to attack your information.
You may think
that you are fully protected, but all it takes is one zero-hour piece of
malware, one for which your anti-virus and anti-spyware have not yet
created a defense, to lose all your personal information to the scammers -
in a flash.
Do you really
want to know what works best against these and all scammers? Fraud
Aid's "Pass the Word" campaign. You, the one who is reading this
right now, are the worst enemy a scammer could ever have. Scammers
are counting on your silence. Don't let them have it!
______________________________
Continued from
Column 1
Phoney checks hitting locally
Algona Upper Des Moines -
Algona,IA,USA
... money orders. In addition, a counterfeit check
scam has hit at least two area residents - with disastrous results for
one. In the ...
See all stories on this topic
Beware of letters saying you won
Niles Daily Star - MI, USA
... possible. "This is a scam. The cashier's check enclosed
with the prize award letter is counterfeit," Underwood said. If the
...
See all stories on this topic
For Love Or Money
WOWT - Omaha,NE,USA
... cash from their accounts 24 hours after depositing a check
but that does not guarantee that the check is good. If it turns out
to be counterfeit, the customer ...
Pawtucket police issue alert about lottery scam
Woonsocket Call - Woonsocket,RI,USA
... Police on Tuesday raised an alert about an ongoing telephone
scam after concluding that the ... The caller told the woman
she won a lottery and was in line for a ...
Brits in £1bn fools' gold
The Sun - UK
... They include the INTERNATIONAL LOTTERY SCAM where
people are told they have won a massive jackpot and then asked to pay a
fee of around £50,000 to "release ...
See all stories on this topic
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