Yesterday, the cyber crime world, to its utter dismay and disarray, learnt of the Operation Phish Fry aimed at scamsters in connection with multinational bank phishing complaints. The latest Operation Phish Fry was planned under the goverments of US and Egypt.
More than fifty-five suspects were nabbed in North Carolina, Nevada and California. The alleged US ringleader Kenneth Joseph Lucas was the only person whose name figured in each of the indictment’s fifty-one counts.
The phishing scam arrests revealed a procedure wherein fraudulent emails were dispatched to tempt victims to bogus bank sites where they were conned into revealing their personal information & banking data. The user details thus gathered were then forwarded to accomplices in USA who facilitated fund transfer to other bank accounts. A part of these funds was withdrawn and later transferred to the Egyptian scamsters.
To quote Thom Mrozek, a spokesman of the US Department of Justice, “At the end of the day, it’s a very simple scheme ; “I think it is very well understood by the average citizen. Everyone out there with a computer has seen e-mails that say, “Hi, we’re from your financial institution. Come to our web site and fill out this information.” This email scam is known to have surfaced strongly since 2007.
As more arrests are made in following days, the moral of the story is never risk disclosure of your personal information on the web in a naive and casual way. A heist can actually leave you distraught.
Tags: Operation Phish Fry