Krebs on Security

Last week I traveled to Cooperstown, N.Y. to deliver a keynote address about the scourge of online banking fraud that I’ve written about so frequently this past year. I flew into Albany, and in the short, 60 minute drive west to Cooperstown, I passed through tiny Duanesburg, a town whose middle school district is still out a half million dollars from e-banking fraud. On my way to Cooperstown, I also passed within a few minutes of several other recent victims — including a wrecking firm based on Schenectady that lost $70,000 last month when organized thieves raided its online bank account.

Alexander “Sandy” Jackson‘s world started crashing down on Apr. 20, the day he learned that more than $70,000 of company’s cash had been transferred to 10 complete strangers scattered about the United States. Since then, the owner of Jackson Demolition Service has spent a good deal of time trying to retrieve that money. So far, he and his bank have recovered about one-third of the amount stolen.

Oddly enough, Jackson first learned of the fraud after being contacted by an individual who received close to $5,000 of the firm’s money.

That individual was Montgomery, Ala. resident April Overton. In March, Overton responded to an e-mail from a company that said it found her resume on Careerbuilder.com, and would she be interested in a work-at-home job entering tax information on behalf of American tax filers? Overton said she accepted the job, and for more than a month worked several hours each day completing various tax forms with personal tax information sent to her via e-mail, forms that she then had to fax back to her employers, who claimed to be Tax World LLC, at www.taxreturnsworld.com.

“I was basically processing tax returns, and they’d have me log in to a site every morning between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 11:30 a.m., and would send me information, have me filing out [IRS Form] 1040 tax returns,” Overton said.

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