Phishing is a form of spam that attempts to deceive recipients to gain access to their personal information.
Phishing is even more dangerous than regular computer virus or worms as it may cost substantial damage to a person’s wealth and reputation.
In this case, unwilling participants who thought they were processing payroll for an international company were actually money mules who are enrolled into a money laundering scheme unwillingly.
Alexey Mineev from New Hampshire recently pleaded guilty to money laundering charges. He set up drop accounts that were used to receive and send money that were stolen from brokerage accounts.
He could be sentenced to two years in prison, and a $40,000 fine.
Alexey, and his co-conspirators, Alexander Bobnev and Aleksey Volynskiy worked as a team. They would con internet users into watching an online video that required a special codec to be installed, a screensaver or a security patch - which would actually be the delivery mechanism for a Trojan.
They could then monitor the users’ online activities and retrieve their passwords and other personal information used for their brokerage or bank accounts.
Bobnev would review the accounts and Alexey and Aleksey would move the funds out of the users’ accounts. Once the money leave the users’ account, it is almost impossible to recover.
This is just one of many cases of large-scale phishing on the internet.
It is good to know that most banks in Singapore have a dual-password system.
However, such systems are also not 100% safe. Hence, it is vital that we are aware of such situation and be more alert when we do transactions on the internet.
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