US, NY Bust 92 Mules In 'ZeuS Trojan' Crime Ring 97
Following on the 19 ZeuS botnet arrests in the UK, adeelarshad82 and other readers sent word that US and New York officials have unsealed more than 90 indictments of money mules and others accused of helping siphon more than $3M from 5 banks and dozens of individuals, and sending it overseas. The Manhattan US Attorney announced charges against 37 individuals and New York charged 55. Most of those indicted are foreign students who came to the US on exchange visitor visas. Most are from Russia, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, or Belarus. Here is the FBI's lengthy press release. A security blogger has put up Facebook party photos of some of the indicted individuals who are still at large.
Shit where do I sign up (Score:5, Insightful)
3 million / 90 = 33k per mule.... wait thats not enough for me to fly across 10 time zones to get arrested a year later.
Seriously crime should pay better even in a recession.
Bad for exchange students (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bad for exchange students (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Shit where do I sign up (Score:5, Insightful)
Life is crap is rather relative. Sure it's not Sweden, but it isn't Burma either.
Most east europeans I know have a fairly decent standard of living. There's room for improvement for sure, but it's not *that* bleak.
Then again, I have an uncle who is a mech eng, and makes something like I'd make at mcdonalds here... but everything domestic there is considerably cheaper, so they aren't starving. The only real problem is getting western goods, or commodities with global prices (fuel is still expensive..) - This works in most parts of east europe I think. Moscow is a batshit insane corner case though, with ridiculous prices...
Somehow they seem to be happier than the average american/canadian IME, though. More of a work enough to survive thing, as opposed to the 60h a week live to work thing we have happening here.
And there's always a selection bias too, I guess. My Russian friends that want to come to the west badly seem to badmouth the motherland a lot more than friends that have no intention of leaving. I think part of it is a grass is greener thing.
Re:WTF is wrong with certain countries ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, it's similar to how certain countries have better presence for certain businesses than others.
i.e. Outsourcing / back office / call centers - India
Electronics - Japan, South Korea
Cars - Germany, Japan
etc
Once an ecosystem is in place for a given LoB, more people will join it. Weather it's legal or illegal depends entirely on how strict the laws are and what opportunities exist as alternative.
Re:Bad for exchange students (Score:3, Insightful)
1. That's all nationalities, ass
2. It's not all citizens, it's politicians who like to look tough on crimes but want to avoid the liabilities that come with cracking down on some of the really big white collar criminals.
Re:Serious Crimes + a Matrix inspired FBI logo (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Small time thieves... all smoke and mirrors. (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't it absurdly ridiculous how quick they are to catch/follow these types of scams/criminals, but completly useless at catching political lobbying/corruption and wall street scams that cause world wide market unstability, worse than oil price spikes or wars?
They really have their priorities well planned by the powers that be (bought/bribed).
In the case of political corruption and institutionalized financial scams, the people who benefit from them tend to be the same people who write the rules. They are also the people who determine things like the FBI's budget. It's a classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse.
Re:Money Mule Groups (Score:3, Insightful)
After posting my email address publicly on careerbuilder.com, I started getting lots of emails advertising money mule positions.
I hear you. It is a annoying that so many +75k job offers [fake salary even if the job were real] completely unrelated to my career follow two principles:
* Taking advantage of our assumption [we are all naive at some point] that all "employers" and "jobs" there are authenticated, which is the whole reason we all fork over a phone, email address and tons of details that facebook would LOVE to data mine
* They're making enough scam-cash to profit despite $400-$600/month fees that job boards charge employers for the most basic rights to access our resumes.
The number of work-from-home emails plummeted when I
1) started aggressively filtering domains, subject lines and even blocking TO: lines lacking my email address (how does that even work?!)
2) most importantly, realized that an e-mail address allows spammers and lazy/obnoxious headhunters to add me to lists [the latter ignoring my OBJECTIVE line]
US headhunters cold-emails for BCC'ing dozens of candidates about bullet points completely absent from my resume. When I withhold that email, their reduced anonymity of being on a phone call has meant that they mention company name, callback number, and almost ALWAYS actually read my resume before making stupid mistakes that the other "toss-garbage-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks" headhunters make constantly. Even on a call, it's obvious that they too say "must have 3 years of active directory experience" or a CCNA, which is not something you just forget to put on your resume --they then realize they called the wrong person and wasted both of our time.
Once on the phone though, legit reps request your email, so you can't go wrong with having screened the callers so you can verify by caller ID / domain names and rep names that you're dealing with a legit entity. Also, to this day no mule jobs have been offered to me over the phone... it's too easy to track phone calls and bust their business model that way.
Re:Err.... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you seriously think anti-trust law is at all similar to criminal law then you are extremely uneducated in legal matters. Fundamentally Microsoft is a legal business. I don't care if you don't like that, it is the truth. It is legal to sell software. Even using somewhat "underhanded" tactics like bundling is legal. It is only a problem if you are a monopoly. In that case it isn't illegal like "You go to jail for it," it just means that the government can take remedies against the anti-competitive behavior. Maybe fines, maybe forcing things to be released to the public, maybe a break up, etc. You'll notice it is civil actions that are taken, not criminal charges.
However fine, leave him off the list then. I can find plenty more like Meg Whitman, Carol Bartz, and so on. There are a lot of business people who have made a lot of money in legit businesses. This is only concentrating on the super successful ones, the multi-millionaire to billionaire ones. The point is that if you are lucky, skilled, and are at the top of something in demand you can make a ton of money. Crime is no different. The crime bosses are not unique in their case.
But please, leave off the MS stuff. It seems like you are allowing your personal dislike for them to cloud your judgment on the reality of the situation.