Serial Swatter Who Caused Death Gets Five Years in Prison

July 21, 2021
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A 18-year-old Tennessee man who helped set in motion a fraudulent distress call to police that led to the death of a 60-year-old grandfather in 2020 was sentenced to 60 months in prison today.

60-year-old Mark Herring died of a heart attack after police surrounded his home in response to a swatting attack.

Shane Sonderman, of Lauderdale County, Tenn. admitted to conspiring with a group of criminals that’s been “swatting” and harassing people for months in a bid to coerce targets into giving up their valuable Twitter and Instagram usernames.

At Sonderman’s sentencing hearing today, prosecutors told the court the defendant and his co-conspirators would text and call targets and their families, posting their personal information online and sending them pizzas and other deliveries of food as a harassment technique.

Other victims of the group told prosecutors their tormentors further harassed them by making false reports of child abuse to social services local to the target’s area, and false reports in the target’s name to local suicide prevention hotlines.

Eventually, when subjects of their harassment refused to sell or give up their Twitter and Instagram usernames, Sonderman and others would swat their targets — or make a false report to authorities in the target’s name with the intention of sending a heavily armed police response to that person’s address.

For weeks throughout March and April 2020, 60-year-old Mark Herring of Bethpage, Tenn. was inundated with text messages asking him to give up his @Tennessee Twitter handle. When he ignored the requests, Sonderman and his buddies began having food delivered to Herring’s home via cash on delivery.

At one point, Sonderman posted Herring’s home address in a Discord chat room used by the group, and a minor in the United Kingdom quickly followed up by directing a swatting attack on Herring’s home.

Ann Billings was dating Mr. Herring and was present when the police surrounded his home. She recalled for the Tennessee court today how her friend died shortly thereafter of a heart attack.

Billings said she first learned of the swatting when a neighbor called and asked why the street was lined with police cars. When Mr. Herring stepped out on the back porch to investigate, police told him to put his hands up and to come to the street.

Unable to disengage a lock on his back fence, Herring was instructed to somehow climb over the fence with his hands up.

“He was starting to get more upset,” Billings recalled. “He said, ‘I’m a 60-year-old fat man and I can’t do that.'”

Billings said Mr. Herring then offered to crawl under a gap in the fence, but when he did so and stood up, he collapsed of a heart attack. Herring died at a nearby hospital soon after.

Mary Frances Herring, who was married to Mr. Herring for 28 years, said her late husband was something of a computer whiz in his early years who secured the @Tennessee Twitter handle shortly after Twitter came online. Internet archivist Jason Scott says Herring was the creator of the successful software products Sparkware and QWIKMail; Scott has 2 hours worth of interviews with Herring from 20 years ago here.

Perhaps the most poignant testimony today came when Ms. Herring said her husband — who was killed by people who wanted to steal his account — had a habit of registering new Instagram usernames as presents for friends and family members who’d just had children.

“If someone was having a baby, he would ask them, ‘What are your naming the baby?’,” Ms. Herring said. “And he would get them that Instagram name and give it to them as a gift.” Continue reading →

Spam Kingpin Peter Levashov Gets Time Served

July 20, 2021
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Peter Levashov, appearing via Zoom at his sentencing hearing today.

A federal judge in Connecticut today handed down a sentence of time served to spam kingpin Peter “Severa” Levashov, a prolific purveyor of malicious and junk email, and the creator of malware strains that infected millions of Microsoft computers globally. Levashov has been in federal custody since his extradition to the United States and guilty plea in 2018, and was facing up to 12 more years in prison. Instead, he will go free under three years of supervised release and a possible fine.

A native of St. Petersburg, Russia, the 40-year-old Levashov operated under the hacker handle “Severa.” Over the course of his 15-year cybercriminal career, Severa would emerge as a pivotal figure in the cybercrime underground, serving as the primary moderator of a spam community that spanned multiple top Russian cybercrime forums.

Severa created and then leased out to others some of the nastiest cybercrime engines in history — including the Storm worm, and the Waledac and Kelihos spam botnets. His central role in the spam forums gave Severa a prime spot to advertise the services tied to his various botnets, while allowing him to keep tabs on the activities of other spammers.

Severa rented out segments of his Waledac botnet to anyone seeking a vehicle for sending spam. For $200, vetted users could hire his botnet to blast one million emails containing malware or ads for male enhancement drugs. Junk email campaigns touting employment or “money mule” scams cost $300 per million, and phishing emails could be blasted out through Severa’s botnet for the bargain price of $500 per million.

Severa was a moderator on the Russian spam community Spamdot[.]biz. In this paid ad from 2004, Severa lists prices to rent his spam botnet.

Early in his career, Severa worked very closely with two major purveyors of spam. One was Alan Ralsky, an American spammer who was convicted in 2009 of paying Severa and other spammers to promote pump-and-dump stock scams.

The other was a major spammer who went by the nickname “Cosma,” the cybercriminal thought to be responsible for managing the Rustock botnet (so named because it was a Russian botnet frequently used to send pump-and-dump stock spam). Microsoft, which has battled to scrub botnets like Rustock off of millions of PCs, later offered a still-unclaimed $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the Rustock author.

Severa ran several affiliate programs that paid cybercriminals to trick people into installing fake antivirus software. In 2011, KrebsOnSecurity dissected “SevAntivir” — Severa’s eponymous fake antivirus affiliate program  — showing it was used to deploy new copies of the Kelihos spam botnet.

A screenshot of the “SevAntivir” fake antivirus or “scareware” affiliate program run by Severa.

In 2010, Microsoft — in tandem with a number of security researchers — launched a combined technical and legal sneak attack on the Waledac botnet, successfully dismantling it. The company would later do the same to the Kelihos botnet, a global spam machine which shared a great deal of code with Waledac and infected more than 110,000 Microsoft Windows PCs.

Levashov was arrested in 2017 while in Barcelona, Spain with his family. According to a lengthy April 2017 story in Wired.com, he got caught because he violated a basic security no-no: He used the same log-in credentials to both run his criminal enterprise and log into sites like iTunes.

In fighting his extradition to the United States, Levashov famously told the media, “If I go to the U.S., I will die in a year.” But a few months after his extradition, Levashov would plead guilty to four felony counts, including intentional damage to protected computers, conspiracy, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.

At his sentencing hearing today, Levashov thanked his wife, attorney and the large number of people who wrote the court in support of his character, but otherwise declined to make a statement. His attorney read a lengthy statement explaining that Levashov got into spamming as a way to provide for his family, and that over a period of many years that business saw him supporting countless cybercrime operations. Continue reading →

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Don’t Wanna Pay Ransom Gangs? Test Your Backups.

July 19, 2021
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Browse the comments on virtually any story about a ransomware attack and you will almost surely encounter the view that the victim organization could have avoided paying their extortionists if only they’d had proper data backups. But the ugly truth is there are many non-obvious reasons why victims end up paying even when they have done nearly everything right from a data backup perspective.

This story isn’t about what organizations do in response to cybercriminals holding their data for hostage, which has become something of a best practice among most of the top ransomware crime groups today. Rather, it’s about why victims still pay for a key needed to decrypt their systems even when they have the means to restore everything from backups on their own.

Experts say the biggest reason ransomware targets and/or their insurance providers still pay when they already have reliable backups is that nobody at the victim organization bothered to test in advance how long this data restoration process might take.

“In a lot of cases, companies do have backups, but they never actually tried to restore their network from backups before, so they have no idea how long it’s going to take,” said Fabian Wosar, chief technology officer at Emsisoft. “Suddenly the victim notices they have a couple of petabytes of data to restore over the Internet, and they realize that even with their fast connections it’s going to take three months to download all these backup files. A lot of IT teams never actually make even a back-of-the-napkin calculation of how long it would take them to restore from a data rate perspective.”

Wosar said the next most-common scenario involves victims that have off-site, encrypted backups of their data but discover that the digital key needed to decrypt their backups was stored on the same local file-sharing network that got encrypted by the ransomware.

The third most-common impediment to victim organizations being able to rely on their backups is that the ransomware purveyors manage to corrupt the backups as well.

“That is still somewhat rare,” Wosar said. “It does happen but it’s more the exception than the rule. Unfortunately, it is still quite common to end up having backups in some form and one of these three reasons prevents them from being useful.” Continue reading →

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, July 2021 Edition

July 13, 2021
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Microsoft today released updates to patch at least 116 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related software. At least four of the vulnerabilities addressed today are under active attack, according to Microsoft.

Thirteen of the security bugs quashed in this month’s release earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating, meaning they can be exploited by malware or miscreants to seize remote control over a vulnerable system without any help from users.

Another 103 of the security holes patched this month were flagged as “important,” which Microsoft assigns to vulnerabilities “whose exploitation could result in compromise of the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of user data, or of the integrity or availability of processing resources.”

Among the critical bugs is of course the official fix for the PrintNightmare print spooler flaw in most versions of Windows (CVE-2021-34527) that prompted Microsoft to rush out a patch for a week ago in response to exploit code for the flaw that got accidentally published online. That patch seems to have caused a number of problems for Windows users. Here’s hoping the updated fix resolves some of those issues for readers who’ve been holding out.

CVE-2021-34448 is a critical remote code execution vulnerability in the scripting engine built into every supported version of Windows — including server versions. Microsoft says this flaw is being exploited in the wild.

Both CVE-2021-33771 and CVE-2021-31979 are elevation of privilege flaws in the Windows kernel. Both are seeing active exploitation, according to Microsoft. Continue reading →

Spike in “Chain Gang” Destructive Attacks on ATMs

July 9, 2021
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Last summer, financial institutions throughout Texas started reporting a sudden increase in attacks involving well-orchestrated teams that would show up at night, use stolen trucks and heavy chains to rip Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) out of their foundations, and make off with the cash boxes inside. Now it appears the crime — known variously as “ATM smash-and-grab” or “chain gang” attacks — is rapidly increasing in other states.

Four different ATM “chain gang” attacks in Texas recently. Image: Texas Bankers Association.

The Texas Bankers Association documented at least 139 chain gang attacks against Texas financial institutions in the year ending November 2020. The association says organized crime is the main source of the destructive activity, and that Houston-based FBI officials have made more than 50 arrests and are actively tracking about 250 individuals suspected of being part of these criminal rings.

From surveillance camera footage examined by fraud investigators, the perpetrators have followed the same playbook in each incident. The bad guys show up in the early morning hours with a truck or tractor that’s been stolen from a local construction site.

Then two or three masked men will pry the front covering from the ATM using crowbars, and attach heavy chains to the cash machine. The canisters of cash inside are exposed once the crooks pull the ATM’s safe door off using the stolen vehicle.

In nearly all cases, the perpetrators are done in less than five minutes.

Tracey Santor is the bond product manager for Travelers, which insures a large number of financial institutions against this type of crime. Santor said investigators questioning some of the suspects learned that the smash-and-grabs are used as a kind of initiation for would-be gang members.

“One of the things they found out during the arrest was the people wanting to be in the gang were told they had to bring them $250,000 within a week,” Santor said. “And they were given instructions on how to do it. I’ve also heard of cases where the perpetrators put construction cones around the ATM so it looks to anyone passing by that they’re legitimately doing construction at the site.”

Santor said the chain gang attacks have spread to other states, and that in the year ending June 2021 Travelers saw a 257 percent increase in the number of insurance claims related to ATM smash-and-grabs.

That 257 percent increase also includes claims involving incidents where attackers will crash a stolen car into a convenience store, and then in the ensuing commotion load the store’s ATM into the back of the vehicle and drive away.

In addition to any cash losses — which can often exceed $200,000 — replacing destroyed ATMs and any associated housing can take weeks, and newer model ATMs can cost $80,000 or more.

“It’s not stopping,” Santor said of the chain gang attacks. “In the last year we counted 32 separate states we’ve seen this type of attack in. Normally we are seeing single digits across the country. 2021 is going to be the same or worse for us than last year.” Continue reading →

Kaseya Left Customer Portal Vulnerable to 2015 Flaw in its Own Software

July 8, 2021
37 Comments

Last week cybercriminals deployed ransomware to 1,500 organizations, including many that provide IT security and technical support to other companies. The attackers exploited a vulnerability in software from Kaseya, a Miami-based company whose products help system administrators manage large networks remotely. Now it appears Kaseya’s customer service portal was left vulnerable until last week to a data-leaking security flaw that was first identified in the same software six years ago.

On July 3, the REvil ransomware affiliate program began using a zero-day security hole (CVE-2021-30116) to deploy ransomware to hundreds of IT management companies running Kaseya’s remote management software — known as the Kaseya Virtual System Administrator (VSA).

According to this entry for CVE-2021-30116, the security flaw that powers that Kaseya VSA zero-day was assigned a vulnerability number on April 2, 2021, indicating Kaseya had roughly three months to address the bug before it was exploited in the wild.

Also on July 3, security incident response firm Mandiant notified Kaseya that their billing and customer support site —portal.kaseya.net — was vulnerable to CVE-2015-2862, a “directory traversal” vulnerability in Kaseya VSA that allows remote users to read any files on the server using nothing more than a Web browser.

As its name suggests, CVE-2015-2862 was issued in July 2015. Six years later, Kaseya’s customer portal was still exposed to the data-leaking weakness.

The Kaseya customer support and billing portal. Image: Archive.org.

Mandiant notified Kaseya after hearing about it from Alex Holden, founder and chief technology officer of Milwaukee-based cyber intelligence firm Hold Security. Holden said the 2015 vulnerability was present on Kaseya’s customer portal until Saturday afternoon, allowing him to download the site’s “web.config” file, a server component that often contains sensitive information such as usernames and passwords and the locations of key databases.

“It’s not like they forgot to patch something that Microsoft fixed years ago,” Holden said. “It’s a patch for their own software. And it’s not zero-day. It’s from 2015!”

The official description of CVE-2015-2862 says a would-be attacker would need to be already authenticated to the server for the exploit to work. But Holden said that was not the case with the vulnerability on the Kaseya portal that he reported via Mandiant.

“This is worse because the CVE calls for an authenticated user,” Holden said. “This was not.”

Michael Sanders, executive vice president of account management at Kaseya, confirmed that the customer portal was taken offline in response to a vulnerability report. Sanders said the portal had been retired in 2018 in favor of a more modern customer support and ticketing system, yet somehow the old site was still left available online.

“It was deprecated but left up,” Sanders said.

In a written statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity, Kaseya said that in 2015 CERT reported two vulnerabilities in its VSA product.

“We worked with CERT on responsible disclosure and released patches for VSA versions V7, R8, R9 and R9 along with the public disclosure (CVEs) and notifications to our customers. Portal.kaseya.net was not considered by our team to be part of the VSA shipping product and was not part of the VSA product patch in 2015. It has no access to customer endpoints and has been shut down – and will no longer be enabled or used by Kaseya.”

“At this time, there is no evidence this portal was involved in the VSA product security incident,” the statement continued. “We are continuing to do forensic analysis on the system and investigating what data is actually there.” Continue reading →

Microsoft Issues Emergency Patch for Windows Flaw

July 7, 2021
91 Comments

Microsoft on Tuesday issued an emergency software update to quash a security bug that’s been dubbed “PrintNightmare,” a critical vulnerability in all supported versions of Windows that is actively being exploited. The fix comes a week ahead of Microsoft’s normal monthly Patch Tuesday release, and follows the publishing of exploit code showing would-be attackers how to leverage the flaw to break into Windows computers.

At issue is CVE-2021-34527, which involves a flaw in the Windows Print Spooler service that could be exploited by attackers to run code of their choice on a target’s system. Microsoft says it has already detected active exploitation of the vulnerability.

Satnam Narang, staff research engineer at Tenable, said Microsoft’s patch warrants urgent attention because of the vulnerability’s ubiquity across organizations and the prospect that attackers could exploit this flaw in order to take over a Windows domain controller.

“We expect it will only be a matter of time before it is more broadly incorporated into attacker toolkits,” Narang said. “PrintNightmare will remain a valuable exploit for cybercriminals as long as there are unpatched systems out there, and as we know, unpatched vulnerabilities have a long shelf life for attackers.”

In a blog post, Microsoft’s Security Response Center said it was delayed in developing fixes for the vulnerability in Windows Server 2016, Windows 10 version 1607, and Windows Server 2012. The fix also apparently includes a new feature that allows Windows administrators to implement stronger restrictions on the installation of printer software.

“Prior to installing the July 6, 2021, and newer Windows Updates containing protections for CVE-2021-34527, the printer operators’ security group could install both signed and unsigned printer drivers on a printer server,” reads Microsoft’s support advisory. “After installing such updates, delegated admin groups like printer operators can only install signed printer drivers. Administrator credentials will be required to install unsigned printer drivers on a printer server going forward.”

Windows 10 users can check for the patch by opening Windows Update. Chances are, it will show what’s pictured in the screenshot below — that KB5004945 is available for download and install. A reboot will be required after installation.

Friendly reminder: It’s always a good idea to backup your data before applying security updates. Windows 10 has some built-in tools to help you do that, either on a per-file/folder basis or by making a complete and bootable copy of your hard drive all at once.

Microsoft’s out-of-band update may not completely fix the PrinterNightmare vulnerability. Security researcher Benjamin Delpy posted on Twitter that the exploit still works on a fully patched Windows server if the server also has Point & Print enabled — a Windows feature that automatically downloads and installs available printer drivers.

Delpy said it’s common for organizations to enable Point & Print using group policies because it allows users to install printer updates without getting approval first from IT.

This post will be updated if Windows users start reporting any issues in applying the patch.

Another 0-Day Looms for Many Western Digital Users

July 2, 2021
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Some of Western Digital’s MyCloud-based data storage devices. Image: WD.

Countless Western Digital customers saw their MyBook Live network storage drives remotely wiped in the past month thanks to a bug in a product line the company stopped supporting in 2015, as well as a previously unknown zero-day flaw. But there is a similarly serious zero-day flaw present in a much broader range of newer Western Digital MyCloud network storage devices that will remain unfixed for many customers who can’t or won’t upgrade to the latest operating system.

At issue is a remote code execution flaw residing in all Western Digital network attached storage (NAS) devices running MyCloud OS 3, an operating system the company only recently stopped supporting.

Researchers Radek Domanski and Pedro Ribeiro originally planned to present their findings at the Pwn2Own hacking competition in Tokyo last year. But just days before the event Western Digital released MyCloud OS 5, which eliminated the bug they found. That update effectively nullified their chances at competing in Pwn2Own, which requires exploits to work against the latest firmware or software supported by the targeted device.

Nevertheless, in February 2021, the duo published this detailed YouTube video, which documents how they discovered a chain of weaknesses that allows an attacker to remotely update a vulnerable device’s firmware with a malicious backdoor — using a low-privileged user account that has a blank password.

The researchers said Western Digital never responded to their reports. In a statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity, Western Digital said it received their report after Pwn2Own Tokyo 2020, but that at the time the vulnerability they reported had already been fixed by the release of My Cloud OS 5.

“The communication that came our way confirmed the research team involved planned to release details of the vulnerability and asked us to contact them with any questions,” Western Digital said. “We didn’t have any questions so we didn’t respond. Since then, we have updated our process and respond to every report in order to avoid any miscommunication like this again. We take reports from the security research community very seriously and conduct investigations as soon as we receive them.”

Western Digital ignored questions about whether the flaw found by Domanski and Ribeiro was ever addressed in OS 3. A statement published on its support site March 12, 2021 says the company will no longer provide further security updates to the MyCloud OS 3 firmware.

“We strongly encourage moving to the My Cloud OS5 firmware,” the statement reads. “If your device is not eligible for upgrade to My Cloud OS 5, we recommend that you upgrade to one of our other My Cloud offerings that support My Cloud OS 5. More information can be found here.” A list of MyCloud devices that can support OS 5 is here. Continue reading →

Intuit to Share Payroll Data from 1.4M Small Businesses With Equifax

July 1, 2021
33 Comments

Financial services giant Intuit this week informed 1.4 million small businesses using its QuickBooks Online Payroll and Intuit Online Payroll products that their payroll information will be shared with big-three consumer credit bureau Equifax starting later this year unless customers opt out by the end of this month.

Intuit says the change is tied to an “exciting” and “free” new service that will let millions of small business employees get easy access to employment and income verification services when they wish to apply for a loan or line of credit.

“In early fall 2021, your QuickBooks Online Payroll subscription will include an automated income and employment verification service powered by The Work Number from Equifax,” reads the Intuit email, which includes a link to the new Terms of Service. “Your employees may need to verify their income and employment info when applying for things like loans, credit, or public aid. Before, you likely had to manually provide this info to lenders, creditors or government agencies. These verifications will be automated by The Work Number, which helps employees get faster approvals and saves you time.”

An Intuit spokesperson clarified that the new service is not available through QuickBooks Online or to QuickBooks Online users as a whole. Intuit’s FAQ on the changes is here.

Equifax’s 2017 megabreach that exposed the personal and financial details of 145.5 million Americans may have shocked the public, but it did little to stop more than a million employers from continuing to sell Equifax their employee payroll data, Bloomberg found in late 2017.

“The workforce-solutions unit is now among Equifax’s fastest-growing businesses, contributing more than a fifth of the firm’s $3.1 billion of revenue last year,” wrote Jennifer Surane. “Using payroll data from government agencies and thousands of employers — including a vast majority of Fortune 500 companies — Equifax has cultivated a database of 300 million current and historic employment records, according to regulatory filings.”

QuickBooks Online user Anthony Citrano posted on Twitter about receiving the notice, noting that the upcoming changes had yet to receive any attention in the financial or larger media space.

“The way I read the terms, Equifax gets to proactively collect all payroll data just in case they need to share it later — similar to how they already handle credit reporting,” said Citrano, who is founder and CEO of Acquicent, a company that issues non-fungible tokens (NFTs). “And that feels like a disaster waiting to happen, especially given Equifax’s history.”

In selling payroll data to Equifax, Intuit will be joining some of the world’s largest payroll providers. For example, ADP — the largest payroll software provider in the United States — has long shared payroll data with Equifax.

But Citrano said this move by Intuit will incorporate a large number of fairly small businesses.

“ADP participates in some way already, but QuickBooks Online jumping on the bandwagon means a lot of employees of small to mid-sized businesses are going to be affected,” he said.

Why might small businesses want to think twice before entrusting Equifax with their payroll data? The answer is the company doesn’t have a great track record of protecting that information. Continue reading →

We Infiltrated a Counterfeit Check Ring! Now What?

June 30, 2021
47 Comments

Imagine waking up each morning knowing the identities of thousands of people who are about to be mugged for thousands of dollars each. You know exactly when and where each of those muggings will take place, and you’ve shared this information in advance with the authorities each day for a year with no outward indication that they are doing anything about it. How frustrated would you be?

A counterfeit check image [redacted] that was intended for a person helping this fraud gang print and mail phony checks tied to a raft of email-based scams. One fraud-fighting group is intercepting hundreds to thousands of these per day.

Such is the curse of the fraud fighter known online by the handles “Brianna Ware” and “B. Ware” for short, a longtime member of a global group of volunteers who’ve infiltrated a cybercrime gang that disseminates counterfeit checks tied to a dizzying number of online scams.

For the past year, B. Ware has maintained contact with an insider from the criminal group that’s been sending daily lists of would-be victims who are to receive counterfeit checks printed using the real bank account information of legitimate companies.

“Some days we’re seeing thousands of counterfeit checks going out,” B. Ware said.

The scams used in connection with the fraudulent checks vary widely, from fake employment and “mystery shopper” schemes to those involving people who have been told they can get paid to cover their cars in advertisements (a.k.a. the “car wrap” scam).

A form letter mailed out with a counterfeit check urges the recipient to text a phone number after the check has been deposited.

Most of the counterfeit checks being disseminated by this fraud group are in amounts ranging from $2,500 to $5,000. The crimes that the checks enable are known variously as “advanced fee” scams, in that they involve tricking people into making payments in anticipation of receiving something of greater value in return.

But in each scheme the goal is the same: Convince the recipient to deposit the check and then wire a portion of the amount somewhere else. A few days after the check is deposited, it gets invariably canceled by the organization whose bank account information was on the check. And then person who deposited the phony check is on the hook for the entire amount.

“Like the car wrap scam, where they send you a check for $5,000, and you agree to keep $1,000 for your first payment and send the rest back to them in exchange for the car wrap materials,” B. Ware said. “Usually the check includes a letter that says they want you to text a specific phone number to let them know you received the check. When you do that, they’ll start sending you instructions on how and where to send the money.”

A typical confirmation letter that accompanies a counterfeit check for a car wrap scam.

Traditionally, these groups have asked recipients to transit money via wire transfer. But these days, B. Ware said, the same crooks are now asking people to forward the money via mobile applications like CashApp and Venmo.

B. Ware and other volunteer fraud fighters believe the fake checks gang is using people looped into phony employment schemes and wooed through online romance scams to print the counterfeit checks, and that other recruits are responsible for mailing them out each day.

“More often than not, the scammers creating the shipping labels will provide those to an unwitting accomplice, or the accomplice is told to log in to an account and print the labels,” B. Ware explained.

Often the counterfeit checks and labels forwarded by B. Ware’s informant come with notes attached indicating the type of scam with which they are associated.

“Sometimes they’re mystery shopper scams, and other times it’s overpayment for an item sold on Craigslist,” B. Ware said. “We don’t know how the scammers are getting the account and routing numbers for these checks, but they are drawn on real companies and always scan fine through a bank’s systems initially. The recipients can deposit them at any bank, but we try to get the checks to the banks when we can so they have a heads up.”

SHRINKING FROM THE FIREHOSE?

Roughly a year ago, B. Ware’s group started sharing its intelligence with fraud investigators at FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service — the primary delivery mechanisms for these counterfeit checks.

Both the USPS and FedEx have an interest in investigating because the fraudsters in this case are using stolen shipping labels paid for by companies who have no idea their FedEx or USPS accounts are being used for such purposes.

“In most cases, the name of the sender will be completely unrelated to what’s being sent,” B. Ware said. “For example, you’ll see a label for a letter to go out with a counterfeit check for a car wrap scam, and the sender on the shipping label will be something like XYZ Biological Resources.”

But B. Ware says a year later, there is little sign that anyone is interested in acting on the shared intelligence.

“It’s so much information that they really don’t want it anymore and they’re not doing anything about it,” B. Ware said of FedEx and the USPS. “It’s almost like they’re turning a blind eye. There are so many of these checks going out each day that instead of trying to drink from the firehouse, they’re just turning their heads.”

FedEx did not respond to requests for comment. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service responded with a statement saying it “does not comment publicly on its investigative procedures and operational protocols.” Continue reading →