Cyber Scams: phony emails, fake Web sites pretending to be banks or mortgage services

The bear economy is creating a bull market for cyber-crooks.

Experts and law-enforcement officials who track Internet crime say scams have intensified in the past six months, as fraudsters take advantage of economic confusion and anxiety to target both consumers and businesses.

Thieves are sending out phony emails and putting up fake Web sites pretending to be banks, mortgage-service providers or even government agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Cellphones and Internet-based phone services have also been used to seek out victims. The object: to drain customer accounts of money or to gain information for identity theft.

Avivah Litan, vice president with Internet-technology research company Gartner Inc., said clients are telling her that cyber-assaults on many banks have doubled in the past six months in the U.S. and other parts of the world, including the U.K., Canada, Mexico and Brazil. Though most are thwarted by computer-security defenses, such as spam filters and fraud-detection systems, that still leaves potentially millions of victims.

"They are all experiencing a lot more attacks, and a lot more ATM fraud" aimed at depositors' accounts, Ms. Litan said.

More than 800 complaints have been logged by the National White Collar Crime Center in Richmond, Va., so far this year from checking-account customers in the U.S. about mysterious, unauthorized transactions of $10 to $40 that appear on monthly statements. Craig Butterworth, a spokesman for the center, a federally funded group that assists police agencies, said investigators suspect a data breach or "phishing" campaign, where deceptive emails and text messages are used to acquire personal information, such as Social Security numbers, user names and passwords. Separately, a "penny" scam of phantom credit- and debit-card charges from 21 cents to 48 cents has generated 300 complaints, Mr. Butterworth said.

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center confirms a increase in cyber-attacks. In its most recent Internet Crime Report, the FBI said it received 207,000 complaints about crimes perpetrated over the Internet in 2007, the latest year for which data are available, amounting to nearly $240 million in reported losses, or $40 million more than a year earlier. Organized groups in the U.S. and elsewhere are behind many of the crimes, experts say.

Until recently, most attacks were scattershot, with spam emails blasted randomly to thousands of computer users at once. Now crooks are starting to single out specific targets identified through prior research, a tactic called "spear phishing." In these attacks, emails are sent to the offices of wealthy families or to corporate money managers, for example. They address potential victims by name and company or appear to come from an acquaintance.

Read the entire article:
http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-bud...ck-in-Downturn

by M.P. McQueen
—Sarah E. Needleman contributed to this article.
Thursday, January 29, 2009

[leonardwills88]

Hello anyone who is interested in saving their savings Many scams are being run to make quick money and I wish to share with everyone about two scammers I have been victim of. Roger Hedin (aka Tony Hedin, Anders Hedin, Hedin Thorwald) and Vincenzo Carpanzano run fraud businesses to rip money off people. One company name they use is:

UNIBANKGROUP
CORPORATE NETWORK LTD
Vincenzo Carpanzano
SUITE B, 29
HARLEY STREET
LONDON
W1G9QR
Company No. 06823275

Mail: Info@corporatenetwork.info
Tel.: ES +34 669 600 542
Tel.: DE +49 177 96 56 171

Who knows how many more there are. Beware!!