More than 100 arrested in Spain in $900,000 WhatsApp scheme
📌Spanish police have arrested 34 individuals suspected of conducting various online scams, seizing firearms, a katana sword, a baseball bat, and €80,000 in the process.
📌The alleged cybercriminals are accused of conducting scams via email, phone, and text, including «son in distress» scams and manipulation of delivery notes from technology companies.
📌They are believed to have netted about €3 million and had access to a database with stolen information on four million people.
📌The operation is part of a larger effort by Spanish law enforcement to crack down on cybercrime and scams.
📌In a separate operation, Spanish police arrested 55 people involved in a wide-ranging cybercrime operation that involved phishing scams, SIM swapping, and more.
📌This group, which called itself the «Black Panthers» and was based in Barcelona, operated in four separate cells that stole about €250,000 from nearly 100 people through a variety of scams that involved the takeover of bank accounts.
📌Impersonation scams reported to the Federal Trade Commission cost victims about $1.1 billion in 2023, more than three times what consumers reported in 2020.
📌Of those reported cases in 2023, about 40 percent started online in one way or another, while a more traditional method — the scam phone call — accounted for 32 percent.
📌Cybercriminals are targeting college students with fake job offers in the bioscience and health industries with the hope of extracting fees out of victims.
📌Researchers at Proofpoint uncovered the campaign, which targeted university students in North America in May and June — graduation season — using job-themed scam emails.
📌Deepfakes are adding an insidious edge to some sextortion schemes, according to a new alert from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).
📌Some extortionists have resorted to using technology to create sexually explicit images or videos from otherwise benign content posted online.
📌Hackers are targeting Asian bank accounts using stolen facial recognition data to bypass security measures.
📌Spanish police arrested a 19-year-old suspected of carrying out a range of high-profile cyberattacks, calling him a «serious threat to national security»
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