The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia last week indicted three men - including an ex-employee of Bank of America and TD Bank - with money
How Fraudsters Nearly Stole $17.5 Million via PPE Fraud
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euroinfosec) • April 14, 2021 Get Permission
Babatunde Teddy Adesanya (left) and Akinpelu Hassan are among four men charged with being part of a sophisticated transnational criminal network. (Photo: Interpol Nigeria)
Stop me if you ve heard this one before: Fraudsters managed to trick a company into wiring them millions of dollars via a business email compromise attack.
But in this case, suspects working across borders, after the COVID-19 crisis began, created a clone of a Dutch personal protective equipment provider s website that looked good enough to trick a German buyer and compromised legitimate email addresses to help make the ruse look more real, according to Interpol, the international police organization.
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A Nigerian national has been sentenced to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to taking part in a business email compromise operation that extorted $11 million from its victims, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Obinwanne Okeke, 33, was an entrepreneur who ran a group of companies called Invictus Group. From 2015 to 2019, he and his co-conspirators obtained the credentials of hundreds of victims, prosecutors say.
One of the victims was Unatrac Holding Ltd., the U.K. affiliate of U.S. heavy equipment manufacturer Caterpillar, which was defrauded of almost $11 million, accounting for the bulk of the scheme s proceeds.
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Researchers at the security firm Proofpoint are tracking several fraud schemes leveraging COVID-19 vaccine-themed emails.
The schemes include business email compromise scams, messages with malicious attachments used to deliver malware and phishing emails designed to harvest credentials - including usernames and passwords for Microsoft Office 365, according to Proofpoint.
The Proofpoint report notes social engineering attacks leveraging vaccine themes have increased over the last two months as pharmaceutical companies have ramped up production (see: Many actors across most geographies are continuing to leverage COVID-19 social engineering, which is an extension of a trend we ve observed since January 2020, says Sherrod DeGrippo, senior director of threat research and detection at Proofpoint