Entries Tagged "crime"

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Gift Card Fraud

It’s becoming an organized crime tactic:

Card draining is when criminals remove gift cards from a store display, open them in a separate location, and either record the card numbers and PINs or replace them with a new barcode. The crooks then repair the packaging, return to a store and place the cards back on a rack. When a customer unwittingly selects and loads money onto a tampered card, the criminal is able to access the card online and steal the balance.

[…]

In card draining, the runners assist with removing, tampering and restocking of gift cards, according to court documents and investigators.

A single runner driving from store to store can swipe or return thousands of tampered cards to racks in a short time. “What they do is they just fly into the city and they get a rental car and they just hit every big-box location that they can find along a corridor off an interstate,” said Parks.

Posted on December 31, 2024 at 7:02 AMView Comments

Criminal Gang Physically Assaulting People for Their Cryptocurrency

This is pretty horrific:

…a group of men behind a violent crime spree designed to compel victims to hand over access to their cryptocurrency savings. That announcement and the criminal complaint laying out charges against St. Felix focused largely on a single theft of cryptocurrency from an elderly North Carolina couple, whose home St. Felix and one of his accomplices broke into before physically assaulting the two victims—­both in their seventies—­and forcing them to transfer more than $150,000 in Bitcoin and Ether to the thieves’ crypto wallets.

I think cryptocurrencies are more susceptible to this kind of real-world attack because they are largely outside the conventional banking system. Yet another reason to stay away from them.

Posted on July 18, 2024 at 11:33 AMView Comments

The Justice Department Took Down the 911 S5 Botnet

The US Justice Department has dismantled an enormous botnet:

According to an indictment unsealed on May 24, from 2014 through July 2022, Wang and others are alleged to have created and disseminated malware to compromise and amass a network of millions of residential Windows computers worldwide. These devices were associated with more than 19 million unique IP addresses, including 613,841 IP addresses located in the United States. Wang then generated millions of dollars by offering cybercriminals access to these infected IP addresses for a fee.

[…]

This operation was a coordinated multiagency effort led by law enforcement in the United States, Singapore, Thailand, and Germany. Agents and officers searched residences, seized assets valued at approximately $30 million, and identified additional forfeitable property valued at approximately $30 million. The operation also seized 23 domains and over 70 servers constituting the backbone of Wang’s prior residential proxy service and the recent incarnation of the service. By seizing multiple domains tied to the historical 911 S5, as well as several new domains and services directly linked to an effort to reconstitute the service, the government has successfully terminated Wang’s efforts to further victimize individuals through his newly formed service Clourouter.io and closed the existing malicious backdoors.

The creator and operator of the botnet, YunHe Wang, was arrested in Singapore.

Three news articles.

Posted on June 7, 2024 at 7:04 AMView Comments

Smuggling Gold by Disguising it as Machine Parts

Someone got caught trying to smuggle 322 pounds of gold (that’s about a quarter of a cubic foot) out of Hong Kong. It was disguised as machine parts:

On March 27, customs officials x-rayed two air compressors and discovered that they contained gold that had been “concealed in the integral parts” of the compressors. Those gold parts had also been painted silver to match the other components in an attempt to throw customs off the trail.

Posted on April 12, 2024 at 7:01 AMView Comments

Tracking Down a Suspect through Cell Phone Records

Interesting forensics in connection with a serial killer arrest:

Investigators went through phone records collected from both midtown Manhattan and the Massapequa Park area of Long Island—two areas connected to a “burner phone” they had tied to the killings. (In court, prosecutors later said the burner phone was identified via an email account used to “solicit and arrange for sexual activity.” The victims had all been Craigslist escorts, according to officials.)

They then narrowed records collected by cell towers to thousands, then to hundreds, and finally down to a handful of people who could match a suspect in the killings.

From there, authorities focused on people who lived in the area of the cell tower and also matched a physical description given by a witness who had seen the suspected killer.

In that narrowed pool, they searched for a connection to a green pickup truck that a witness had seen the suspect driving, the sources said.

Investigators eventually landed on Heuermann, who they say matched a witness’ physical description, lived close to the Long Island cell site and worked near the New York City cell sites that captured the other calls.

They also learned he had often driven a green pickup truck, registered to his brother, officials said. But they needed more than just circumstantial evidence.

Investigators were able to obtain DNA from an immediate family member and send it to a specialized lab, sources said. According to the lab report, Heuermann’s family member was shown to be related to a person who left DNA on a burlap sack containing one of the buried victims.

There’s nothing groundbreaking here; it’s casting a wide net with cell phone geolocation data and then winnowing it down using other evidence and investigative techniques. And right now, those are expensive and time consuming, so only used in major crimes like murder (or, in this case, murders).

What’s interesting to think about is what happens when this kind of thing becomes cheap and easy: when it can all be done through easily accessible databases, or even when an AI can do the sorting and make the inferences automatically. Cheaper digital forensics means more digital forensics, and we’ll start seeing this kind of thing for even routine crimes. That’s going to change things.

Posted on July 17, 2023 at 7:13 AMView Comments

Self-Driving Cars Are Surveillance Cameras on Wheels

Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence:

While security cameras are commonplace in American cities, self-driving cars represent a new level of access for law enforcement ­ and a new method for encroachment on privacy, advocates say. Crisscrossing the city on their routes, self-driving cars capture a wider swath of footage. And it’s easier for law enforcement to turn to one company with a large repository of videos and a dedicated response team than to reach out to all the businesses in a neighborhood with security systems.

“We’ve known for a long time that they are essentially surveillance cameras on wheels,” said Chris Gilliard, a fellow at the Social Science Research Council. “We’re supposed to be able to go about our business in our day-to-day lives without being surveilled unless we are suspected of a crime, and each little bit of this technology strips away that ability.”

[…]

While self-driving services like Waymo and Cruise have yet to achieve the same level of market penetration as Ring, the wide range of video they capture while completing their routes presents other opportunities. In addition to the San Francisco homicide, Bloomberg’s review of court documents shows police have sought footage from Waymo and Cruise to help solve hit-and-runs, burglaries, aggravated assaults, a fatal collision and an attempted kidnapping.

In all cases reviewed by Bloomberg, court records show that police collected footage from Cruise and Waymo shortly after obtaining a warrant. In several cases, Bloomberg could not determine whether the recordings had been used in the resulting prosecutions; in a few of the cases, law enforcement and attorneys said the footage had not played a part, or was only a formality. However, video evidence has become a lynchpin of criminal cases, meaning it’s likely only a matter of time.

Posted on July 3, 2023 at 7:04 AMView Comments

Typing Incriminating Evidence in the Memo Field

Don’t do it:

Recently, the manager of the Harvard Med School morgue was accused of stealing and selling human body parts. Cedric Lodge and his wife Denise were among a half-dozen people arrested for some pretty grotesque crimes. This part is also at least a little bit funny though:

Over a three-year period, Taylor appeared to pay Denise Lodge more than $37,000 for human remains. One payment, for $1,000 included the memo “head number 7.” Another, for $200, read “braiiiiiins.”

It’s so easy to think that you won’t get caught.

Posted on June 27, 2023 at 4:36 PMView Comments

Ransomware Payments Are Down

Chainalysis reports that worldwide ransomware payments were down in 2022.

Ransomware attackers extorted at least $456.8 million from victims in 2022, down from $765.6 million the year before.

As always, we have to caveat these findings by noting that the true totals are much higher, as there are cryptocurrency addresses controlled by ransomware attackers that have yet to be identified on the blockchain and incorporated into our data. When we published last year’s version of this report, for example, we had only identified $602 million in ransomware payments in 2021. Still, the trend is clear: Ransomware payments are significantly down.

However, that doesn’t mean attacks are down, or at least not as much as the drastic drop-off in payments would suggest. Instead, we believe that much of the decline is due to victim organizations increasingly refusing to pay ransomware attackers.

Posted on January 31, 2023 at 7:03 AMView Comments

Textbook Rental Scam

Here’s a story of someone who, with three compatriots, rented textbooks from Amazon and then sold them instead of returning them. They used gift cards and prepaid credit cards to buy the books, so there was no available balance when Amazon tried to charge them the buyout price for non-returned books. They also used various aliases and other tricks to bypass Amazon’s fifteen-book limit. In all, they stole 14,000 textbooks worth over $1.5 million.

The article doesn’t link to the indictment, so I don’t know how they were discovered.

EDITED TO ADD (11/12): Press release.

Posted on October 20, 2021 at 6:16 AMView Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.

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