UK Cops Expose Three Men over Financial Fraud

The PCeU (Police's Central eCrime Unit) of Britain lately declared that a group of 3 individuals belonging to the Baltic States which carried out one malware scam to steal money would go to jail, published informationweek.com dated July 2, 2012.

The trio comprised 28-yr-old Pavel Cyganok a Lithuanian citizen, 26-yr-old Ilja Zakrevski of Estonia, and Aldis Krummins of Latvia. While Cyganok and Zakrevski got 5 and 4 years imprisonment respectively over accusation that they misused computers within the purview of the Computer Misuse Act, Krummins got a 2-year prison sentence after getting convicted for offences related to money laundering within the same financial fraud that yielded the men 100,000 pounds (USD155,000).

Police said that the trio's investigation started during January 2012, while it associated with the men's malicious utilization of one distinctly customized variant of Trojan SpyEye that unearthed end-users' private banking information followed with transmitting the same onto a distantly located hacker-controlled server.

Meanwhile during March 2010, Estonian Police was first to contact British Police regarding Zakrevski amidst suspicion that he was attacking British banks using the SpyEye malware. He then allegedly manipulated for storing the filched information inside databases called Command-and-Control servers located worldwide, including one inside Britain.

A thorough probe determined that the Trojan contaminated approximately 1,000 PCs and linked them up with the server, while investigators spotted hijacked bank accounts belonging to British, Dutch and Danish citizens that were manipulated for committing fraud.

Police also found that the cyber-criminals employed the SpyEye variant for stealing credit card details off people's computers and exploited them for buying IT gadgets, luxury goods, and getting car insurances.

Appreciating the British cops' efforts Paul Ducklin, Head of Technology at Sophos blogged that convictions for online offences related to malware were infrequent, particularly since there were international jurisdictional complications in probing as also prosecuting such crimes. He added that even with such problems, police at times did succeed in nabbing their target or targets. Nakedsecurity.sophos.com published this on July 1, 2012.

Conclusively, PCeU said that people required adopting worthy precautions for safeguarding their private data, reiterating that unguarded PCs were increasingly vulnerable to contamination followed with data-leakage.

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» SPAMfighter News - 7/7/2012