Money Mule Recruitment...

FYI…

- http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00001292.html
October 12, 2007 - "Bobbear fights money transfer frauds. Bobbear.co.uk lists many of the sites used by the bad guys attempting to recruitment money mules. Well — The bad guys have struck back. The fraudsters have attacked the site's reputation and Bobbear is current offline. Earlier today, it was also unavailable via Google's cache. Today we also happened to receive some spam that caught our interest. It was a job recruitment from Next Level — one of the fraud sites listed at Bobbear. We examined the Next Level scam site until we made the connection to the real world company whose web design was being ripped off by the fraudsters. They're Solutions Inc…"

(Screenshots and more info available at the URL above.)

Also:
> http://preview.tinyurl.com/2usunx
October 12, 2007 - McAfee Avert Labs blog

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FYI…

Raining Money Mules
- http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00001318.html
November 14, 2007 - "The USA Web site of Korean pop singer "Rain" has been hacked to host a money mule fraud site… Money mules are very often unsuspecting people getting tricked into helping out in money laundry schemes. They receive stolen money into their accounts, withdraw it in cash, and then transfer it to the bad guys by using some more anonymous service, such as Western Union. When authorities look into these cases the trail will always lead to the money mule, not the people behind the crime. We see these cases pretty frequently but it's not that often that a site gets hacked and used to host the mule site… An excellent catch by Bob over at Bobbear.co.uk…"

(Screenshot available at the URL above.)

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FYI…

- http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/12/2…ney_mules_scam/
20 Dec 2007 - "Dutch police have arrested 14 suspects who allegedly lent their bank accounts at ABN Amro to cybercriminals in Russia and Ukraine. After being recruited by the fraudsters, the mules received funds taken from phishing scams, which they transferred overseas. The twelve men and two women were bailed today. Customers of ABN Amro were lured to bogus websites in Hong Kong which were set up to gather security details. Money stolen from their accounts was then transferred to Russia and other countries. The collaborators were generously remunerated, the Prosecutor’s Office said today. The cybercriminals often used IP addresses through Russian Business Network based in St Petersburg, an ISP notorious for hosting illegal and dubious businesses, including child pornography, phishing and malware distribution sites…"

FYI…

Red Cross money mule recruitment
- http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00001344.html
December 19, 2007 - " Money mule recruitment is getting more and more blatant. We just ran across a -spam- run that uses Red Cross as the lure to recruit people for money laundering.
Example below (emphasis ours):

From: American Red Cross ([removed])
Subject: Red Cross and its new Projects in Europe. Join now!
American Red Cross Donation Department is looking for new partners in European region. With over 30 million US dollars offered as charity funds for for EU Projects, American Red Cross Charity Department needs more employees in European Union.
The vacancy available at the moment is "Donation Collector"…"