by certifiedbug on February 18, 2010
in News
Press Release.
Scams Prey on Victims of the Recession With Bogus Job, Money-Making Schemes
The Federal Trade Commission today announced a new crackdown on con artists who are preying on unemployed Americans with job-placement and work-at-home scams, promoting empty promises that they can help people get jobs in the federal government, as movie extras, or as mystery shoppers; or make money working from their homes stuffing envelopes or assembling ornaments.
With the U.S. unemployment rate just under 10 percent, the FTC is redoubling its efforts to put a stop to these schemes, which make life even more difficult for hundreds of thousands of Americans already wrestling with the economic downturn.
As part of the law enforcement sweep announced today, dubbed “Operation Bottom Dollar,†the FTC has filed seven cases against the operators of deceptive and illegal job and money-making scams and announced developments in four previously filed job scam cases. In addition, the sweep includes 43 criminal actions by the Department of Justice, many involving the substantial assistance of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, as well as one additional civil action by the Postal Inspection Service and 18 actions by state attorneys general.
http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2010/02/bottomdollar.shtm
SANS Internet Storm Center
Handler’s Diary July 23rd 2006
Reader Ivan alerted us earlier today about an email scam that has surfaced in the past few days. Here’s the text of the message he saw:
Subject: egold transaction
Message:
Good day,
Yesterday I was checking my egold account and was surprised at what I saw: I had almost 200 ounces of gold (USD 100,177.90). I never had so much money, (I only had USD177.90 in my account at he time of this transaction) I don’t know how did they get there. I clicked on history and saw that money were transferred 2 hours ago, in the memo field I saw your email address:[email] When I was trying to sort this out – money disappeared from my egold account. I lost my money and money that came from nowhere. I changed my password immediately and now I am trying to find out what has happened. Luckily I made a screenshot with the transaction history for you to see and tell me what is going on. I hope that you will let me know what has happened. I did not contact egold support yet. I hope that we will be able to sort this matter ASAP. Before I will contact them.
Not a bad job of building a scam. As you might expect, there was a file attachment that looks fairly innocent, “screen.zip” and likely would fool many unsuspecting victims. Opening the file we find an executable file inside the archive that is named “screen.jpeg (many spaces) .exe” that in turn has a filesize of 8,485 bytes. Most of you know what happens next…
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