Nearly 4,000 Arrested In Global Police Crackdown On Online Scam Networks

According to Interpol, nearly 4,000 people around the world have been arrested for a variety of online crimes, with $257 million in assets seized. The Record reports: The operation, dubbed First Light, was conducted by police officers from 61 countries and targeted phishing, investment fraud, fake online shopping sites, romance scams, and impersonation scams, according to a statement by Interpol. In addition to arresting thousands of potential cybercriminals, the police also identified over 14,600 other possible suspects across all continents.

During the searches, law enforcement seized suspects' real estate, high-end vehicles, expensive jewelry, and many other high-value items and collections. They also froze 6,745 bank accounts used for transferring money obtained through illegal operations. In one case, the police intercepted $331,000 gleaned from a business email compromise fraud involving a Spanish victim who unknowingly transferred money to someone in Hong Kong. In another case, authorities in Australia successfully recovered $3.7 million on behalf of an impersonation scam victim after the funds were fraudulently transferred to bank accounts in Malaysia and Hong Kong.

The criminal networks identified during the operation were spread around the globe. In Namibia, for example, the police rescued 88 local youths who were forced into conducting scams as part of a sophisticated international crime network, according to Interpol. Law enforcement from Singapore, Hong Kong, and China prevented an attempted tech support scam, saving a 70-year-old victim from losing $281,200 worth of savings.

The bee keeper

[bferrell]

Came alive

All that effort and ingenuity

[oumuamua]

Why don't they just apply that energy to running a proper businesses? What would be neat is if someone researched these people and made a documentary listing what they did before turning to crime.

Re:

[regyfrancis]

Their subconscious is 'wired' for self destruction-- convinced of their own failure. Survival of the fittest... Weeding out the deadwood?

less than a drop in the bucket

[zeiche]

not sure this law enforcement action is going to do anything. so they took expensive stuff? how long would it take a criminal to replace everything that was seized? tiny setback, not devastation.

Re:

[Compaq Disk Rereader]

At the least this is going to make these guys paranoid. The loss of trust among thieves.

Can I trust my VoIP guy? Are my employees snitching? Awful weird that my hosting guy didn't personally answer any of my emails and then ran a sale when he came back. A lot of these guys had less OPSEC than dudes hawking bootlegs at the flea market and for a lot of them those days are over.

No refunds

[Daina.0]

I don't think there's the slimmest chance my mother will get any of her life savings back. We warned her again and again and she still sent everything she could to these thieves. In her late 80s and with dementia just beginning, she was a willing dupe.

A fence at the top...

[VeryFluffyBunny]

...or an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff? You decide which is more effective. We can force the banks to be more secure (a fence at the top) & require that they effectively verify the identities of everyone they do business with, e.g. a person has to be physically present at a govt office to acquire secure ID (i.e. don't leave secure IDs up to the banks because you absolutely know they care more about volume of transactions than crime), rather than law enforcement running around the world, across multiple jurisdictions, with varying degrees of cooperation from those countries, to try to catch criminals in such a easy, victim-rich environment (an ambulance at the bottom).

Lots of countries already have mandatory ID systems in place & also have implemented or are going to implement secure digital versions. If someone hasn't securely ID-ed themselves, then there's mandatory further security steps to verify that they're legitimate clients & not some scam-slave in a scam farm in Namibia. It'd also be more secure to make all transactions person to person, i.e. no "businesses" but a securely ID-ed human representative of a business. That way, there's always someone clearly identifiable if anything illegal happens.

I won't eliminate these kinds of crimes altogether but it'll make it substantially more difficult & would also mean crimes with higher penalties/sentences would also have to be committed against governments themselves. I reckon this'd also make govt to govt negotiations & cooperation across countries to reduce crime more productive.

Of course, I bet banks, which make substantial percentages of their profits from the sheer volume of scam transactions, would be vehemently against effective measures to reduce crime & therefore their profit margins. Talk about perverse incentives.

Re:

[stabiesoft]

I'm not sure I'd blame the banks. I know I have a relative where the bank notified the kids that their mom was making some weird transactions. The bank also let the woman know that this looked like a scam. But the bank must do the transaction as directed short a legal intervention where she is declared incompetent. The woman lost most her money. Consider the reverse side, you want to make a transaction and the bank declines it for your own good. I'd find another bank. Competency is a tricky thing. Conservat

Re:

[Falconhell]

I live in Australia and our banks are very good in this respect, any overseas transaction from an account that doesn't do them is stopped and queried, as are ones where the account name on the transfer doesn't match the receivers account name, whilst the bank couldn't tell me the name of the actual account holder, they were very firm convincing me it was a scam, and they were right.

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

You're applying scenarios to how things are now. If you change how things work, then the scenarios will work out differently, as the post by Falconhell illustrates rather well.

Re:

[stabiesoft]

Falconhell agrees with me. It is still up to the individual. In his case the bank told him they thought it was a scam and he took their advice. In my case, my inlaw was not "all there" and did not take the bank's advice and proceeded with the transaction against the advice of bank and their kids. And as a result, lost money. As I said, short a conservatorship, you cannot stop someone from spending their money.

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

Oh dear. Still victim blaming.

crackdowns

[groobly]

Crackdowns only prove that lack of enforcement is business as usual.

Re:crackdowns [can work, but...]

[shanen]

Seems to be the best comment on the story. And there I was fantasizing my spam might be reduced.

Hint: Go after the money. PoC is the pump-and-dump stock-scam spam you no longer receive.