Scams

A Japanese dating site called DEAiBBS was launched in 2005 and were soon advertising that they had about 120,000 members. In 7 years of operation it has been reported that the dating site has earned 2 billion yen ($22.7 million USD). On January 15, 2013 7 people were arrested and charged with fraud relating to DEAiBBS. It has been alleged by the police that 80 percent of the members of DEAiBBS were not real people. 4 of the arrested people were part-time employees whose job it was to create fake profiles and communicate with other members to dupe them to pay and upgrade their memberships.

Over 45 claims have been filed against the dating service which are looking in total for 85 million yen ($965 thousand USD) in damages. Some victims of the fraudulent dating service had lost more than $10,000 USD to the company.

For more on this story you can read the Japan Daily Press.

Here is another dating profile story. This one involves claims that 2 rival dating sites (Dating Network Limited and Xfactor Online Dating Limited) in the United Kingdom have stolen 9,000 profiles from the dating site Guardian Soulmates (which is run by the Guardian Newspaper). The Guardian has sued these dating sites in the High Court of Justice in London and says:

... that the actions violate its rights under EU law, which give the builders and owners of databases special protections over and above copyright law.

The Guardian has two main issues with the stolen profiles. First, they want to protect their member's privacy, and second, they do not people to think that they have a commercial relationship with the 2 accused dating sites.

For more on this story, read The Register.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) court action against Scott Mark Moles and Jobspy Pty Ltd have seen fines totaling $6.5 million AUD over a mobile phone dating scam.

The scam generated more than $2 million in revenues and involved employees of Jobspy Pty Ltd creating fake profiles on legitimate dating site with the purpose of obtaining cell phone number of other members. The scammers would then conduct text message conversation with these members via a so-called "safe divert" service to keep their mobile phone number private. In reality the members who were being scammed, were being charged $5 per text message. They were told by the scammers that the "safe divert" service was part of their dating site membership fees.

For the full news item, read News.com.au.

I had a laugh when I saw an article about how the global economy downturn has made it harder for Nigeria's scammers to find unsuspecting people to steal money from. This doesn't mean that there are less scammers out there, in fact there are more and they are trying even harder.

U.S. authorities say Americans -- the easiest prey, according to Nigerian scammers -- lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year to cybercrimes, including a scheme known as the Nigerian 419 fraud, named for a section of the Nigerian criminal code.

The Washington Post interviewed 4 self proclaimed scammers or yahoo-yahoo boys as they call themselves in Nigeria. The ones who do well at their trade can earn up to $60,000 in a good month though, business lately is down over 40 percent. Most scammers are young men who started in college and who then learned the skills of their “trade” from each other.

Swindles to watch out for through emails:

• The work-from-home scam. Currently the most lucrative.
• The lottery scam. How can you win a lotto you never apply for?
• Emails that promise money or jewels that are stuck at a bank scam. This usually requires paperwork (personal info) or fees to get.
• Dating Scams that promise love, but need you to send money, usually out of the country.

Remember as in “real life”, you always need to be carefully of who you deal with online when comes to your personal information and money. For the full story, visit the Washington Post.

On Thursday, an unknown number of the over 200 million Facebook users, gave up their passwords to hackers in an email phishing scheme. Hackers initially cracked passwords of a number of Facebook accounts and then, using these accounts, sent emails to the account holders Facebook friends telling them to visit the website. The link in the email actually sent them to another website which was made to look like Facebook. When the friends logged in, they unwittingly gave up their real Facebook username and password. It is thought that the attack was designed to spread SPAM and steal identities. The affected Facebook accounts have now been closed. Apparently Facebook faced a similar attack 2 weeks ago.

Last year a similar attack type of phishing attack happened to Facebook and MySpace users. The difference that time was a virus called Koobface, which users unwittingly downloaded, was used to generate a fake email.

Last month Match.com members faced a similar phishing expedition by hackers when they were sent emails that looked like they came from Match (see Story). The email asked them to log into a fake website to view pictures and a video which required a special video player. This video player was actually a virus.

For the full story, read Reuters.

According to an online report, it looks like email spammers are spoofing Match.com. Since Monday spammers have sent out emails that appear on the surface to be from Match.com.

The attack involves messages claiming to be from someone on the dating website who wants to show the user pictures and videos.

If the link is clicked on, you are then directed to a malicious website which then attempts to install a fake video player which is actually the Trojan called Papras. From the F-Secure website summary page on this Malware:

Trojan-PSW.Win32.Papras.DC steals login credentials and other sensitive information on the compromised system. It also drops and uses a rootkit driver to hide itself. The rootkit driver is detected as Rootkit.Win32.Agent.SZ.

This is definitely not something you want installed on your computer.

The good news is most of the popular Anti-Virus programs will protect you from this threat being installed now (as long as you keep them updated), but as always you should be careful when clicking on any link from an email. If you get an email that you are unsure of and it is from a website you deal with, always visit the website by your browsers bookmarks instead of the link in the email. You should also forward the email to the company to let them know you think someone is sending you fake emails.

Match.com is far from the first site to be spoofed like this, though it is the first time I have heard of a dating site having this trouble. Usually it is the major banks or websites like PayPal which get targeted by email spoofers.

Visit mxLogic for more information on this story and read F-Secure for more about what Papras modifies on your computer.