Romance Scammer and BEC Fraudster Sent to Prison for 25 years

[upnorth]

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https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2022/10/04/romance-scammer-and-bec-fraudster-sent-to-prison-for-25-years/

Elvis, you might say, has left the building, but only to be transported from court to federal prison.

In this case, we’re referring to Elvis Eghosa Ogiekpolor, jailed for 25 years in Atlanta, Georgia for running a cybercrime group that scammed close to $10,000,000 in under two years from individuals and business caught up in so-called romance and BEC scams. Five other co-conspirators who seem to have “worked for” Ogiekpolor have already pleaded guilty in this case; as far as we know, they haven’t been sentenced yet.

BEC is short for business email compromise, an umbrella term for a form of online scam in which the attackers acquire login access to email accounts inside a company, so that the fraudulent emails they send don’t just seem to come from the company they’re attacking, but actually do come from there. This sort of scam is also commonly, if somewhat confusingly, known as CEO fraud or CFO fraud, because BEC criminals aim to get access to the email of the most influential employees they can. Those names don’t denote that the CEO or CFO is carrying out the fraud, but rather that their names and email accounts have been taken over to issue fake payment instructions to staff, suppliers and customers, thus diverting incoming and outgoing payments to rogue bank accounts.

As you can imagine, crooks with access to an employee’s real mailbox can pull off all sorts of low-tech but effective scamming tricks

Romance scammer and BEC fraudster sent to prison for 25 years

Two years of scamming + $10 million leeched = 25 years in prison. Just in time for #Cybermonth.

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