Financial Crime Online

Ikea has always had the reputation to combat corruption to the max. It launched its first store in Russia in 2000. That launch was hindered by bureaucracy  and ‘bribe seeking’ attention from local officials. 7 years later, Ikea still faces the same hurdles each time it opens a store location:
The store’s opening has reportedly been [...]

Old fashioned ‘hacking’… A gambling addict in the UK showed how easy it is to circumvent some bank’s security controls. He collected a lot of personal information of random individuals; he researched details such as mothers’ maiden names and people’s first schools at the General Register Office for Scotland in Edinburgh. After having retrieved a [...]

Hacking and banking; 2009 was full of it. Law enforcement was able to capture a ring of hackers responsible for some major 2008 bank data thefts and subsequent fraudulent transactions. ‘Hacking and fraudulent banking’ is likely attractive enough from a risk/reward point of view to see whole floods of hackers trying their luck (or testing [...]

In crime reporting the attention is usually drawn to the ‘latest and greatest’. Spectacular stuff. Medicare fraud seems boring; not the place a cop would want to spend his career? Let’s view it from a criminal’s point of view; risk and reward. Medicare fraud nets billions, without the risks of getting shot or ripped. Medicare [...]

‘Fort Lauderdale Attorney Charged in Billion-Dollar Ponzi Scheme’. This headline would probably have hit you harder in a pre-Madoff era. But even now this is quite an impressive allegation. The FBI and IRS seek to confiscate $1.2 billion, including (the usual) ferraris, roll’s royces, yachts, houses, jewelry, bank accounts in Morocco and Gibraltar and what [...]

A Pa. lawyer, Mr. Karoly, was convicted of fraud and money laundering.
Prosecutors claimed that the lawyer and his brothers faked a will to collect “a significant portion” of his brother’s and sister-in-law’s multi-million dollar estates after they were killed in a Feb. 2, 2007 plane crash.
Other than that, the U.S. District Judge said that 59-year-old [...]

A Chicago police sergeant who heads a local sergeants association has been arrested on charges he stole more than $600,000 from the organization.
Prosecutors allege he made withdrawals and wrote checks payable to himself on the association’s bank account. He allegedly laundered the proceeds to his personal credit card and bank accounts.
Authorities claim the CPD sergeant [...]

Finally; a new acronym. FFETF. Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force. Why the wait?
Anyway: a new task force, headed by DOJ, with a serious mission:
“This task force’s mission is not just to hold accountable those who helped bring about the last financial meltdown, but to prevent another meltdown from happening.”
The taskforce  is composed of senior-level officials [...]

Heard the story of criminals setting up their own ATM in town to get your card data and PIN number so they can plunder your account? It happened (and not just once). Experts call it a “Ghost ATM”. It is (too?) easy to buy an ATM, place it somewhere and wait for people to use [...]

Two alleged hackers in their twenties and an unknown “Hacker 3″ have been indicted on charges of hacking into a computer network operated by the Atlanta-based credit card processing company RBS WorldPay.
The indictment alleges that the group used sophisticated hacking techniques to compromise the data encryption that was used by RBS WorldPay to protect customer [...]