Law enforcement throughout Belgium and the Netherlands are boasting to have dismantled an structured crime group dependable for thieving tens of millions of euros from phishing victims.
An motion day on June 21 led to the arrests of 9 persons and 24 house queries in the Netherlands. Police also seized firearms, ammunition, jewelry, digital units, dollars and cryptocurrency, in accordance to Europol.
The plan by itself seems to have been pretty very simple in its conception and execution.
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Unsolicited messages have been sent to victims by using email, text and IM channels, with a hyperlink to what was claimed to be a legit banking web-site.
After clicking as a result of, the victims ended up taken to a phishing web-site and tricked into entering their actual banking log-ins. This enabled the group to hijack the accounts, and use revenue mules to transfer cash to other accounts ahead of cashing out.
Some members of the group have also been joined to drug trafficking and possibly buying and selling in firearms, Europol claimed.
The scheme enabled the team to steal a number of million euros from their victims, amounting to hundreds of thousands of bucks.
Recorded phishing attacks hit an all-time higher in the very first quarter of 2022, topping one million for the very first time, in accordance to market entire body the Anti-Phishing Functioning Team (APWG).
It claimed the monetary sector was the worst hit, with spoofed messages coming from banking companies and similar firms accounting for 24% of the whole.
March was the worst thirty day period on history for phishing, with 384,291 attacks detected.
Organized criminal offense groups more and more use cyber strategies as just 1 way to generate earnings, in accordance to a Europol report from 2020.
“Criminal teams rarely concentrate on a solitary legal exercise,” it pointed out. “They normally engage in different actions. For case in point, drug trafficking is generally mixed with other actions such as fraud, money laundering and illegal immigration.”
Some sections of this post are sourced from:
www.infosecurity-magazine.com
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