Thieves Replacing Money Mules With Prepaid Cards?
Summary: In a March 13, 2012 ebanking heist at Alta East, a wholesale gasoline dealer in Middletown, N.Y., four employees opened an emailed PDF carrying a hidden Javascript element that infected their Windows XP systems with a ZeuS Trojan variant; six days later thieves initiated 30 fraudulent transfers totaling more than $121,000, half of them to Metabank prepaid cards. Krebs reports the shift to prepaid cards as an effort to sidestep money mules, which cost 40-50 percent of transfer amounts, take weeks to groom, and are limited to under $10,000 per mule to avoid anti-money laundering triggers.
What's compelling: Alta East is facing an $80,000 loss after its bank's same-day email notification of the fraudulent payroll batch went unread until the next morning, and businesses have basically no legal protection from their bank for cyber fraud losses.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Fraud & Scams
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