A California escrow firm that sued its bank last year after losing nearly $400,000 in a 2010 cyberheist has secured a settlement that covers the loss and the company’s attorneys fees. The settlement is notable because such cases typically favor the banks, and litigating them is often prohibitively expensive for small- to mid-sized businesses victimized by these crimes.
Recent ebanking heists — such as a $121,000 online robbery at a New York fuel supplier last month — suggest that cyber thieves increasingly are cashing out by sending victim funds to prepaid debit card accounts. The shift appears to be an effort to route around a major bottleneck for these crimes: Their dependency on unreliable money mules.
Mules traditionally have played a key role in helping thieves cash out hacked accounts and launder money. They are recruited through email-based work-at-home job scams, and are told they will be helping companies process payments. In a typical scheme, the mule provides her banking details to the recruiter, who eventually sends a fraudulent transfer and tells the mule to withdraw the funds in cash, keep a small percentage, and wire the remainder to co-conspirators abroad.
A new service on the cyber criminal underground can be hired to tie up the phone lines of any targeted mobile or land line around the world. The service is marketed as a diversionary tactic to assist e-thieves in robbing commercial customers of banks that routinely call customers to verify large financial transfers.
A title insurance firm in Virginia is suing its bank after an eight-day cyber heist involving more than $2 million in thefts and more than $200,000 in losses last year. In an unusual twist, at least some of the Eastern European thieves involved in the attack have already been convicted and imprisoned for their roles in the crime.
Phishers and cyber thieves have been casting an unusually wide net lately, blasting out huge volumes of fraudulent email designed to spread password-stealing banking Trojans. Judging from the number of victims who reported costly cyber heist in the past two weeks, many small to medium sized organizations took the bait.
A California escrow firm has been forced to take out a pricey loan to pay back $465,000 that was stolen when hackers hijacked the company’s online bank account earlier this year.
In March, computer criminals broke into the network of Redondo Beach-based Village Escrow Inc. and sent 26 consecutive wire transfers to 20 individuals around the world who had no legitimate business with the firm.
