Feds bust up identity theft ring in the U.S. and Egypt
October 9, 2009 – 1:48 pm
One hundred Egyptians and Americans were indicted Wednesday in what federal agents are calling one of the largest cybercrime cases ever. Fifty-three of those charged are living in the United States while the remaining hail from Egypt. In a speech on Wednesday, FBI Director Robert Mueller said that fifty had been apprehended and the remaining half were currently being pursued.
The international identity theft ring was responsible for conning two banks and about 5,000 U.S. citizens out of over two million dollars. The group of hackers used the common scam of “phishing” to obtain information on the victims. Phishing is a common method used by ID thieves where they use official looking emails to fool people into entering their actual information. The thieves then take that info and use it to access bank accounts, apply for credit cards or take out loans in the victim’s name.
Most recently phishing has been blamed for the massive Hotmail, MSN, Live and Gmail account breaches that resulted in over 10,000 customers being effected. You can see more stories about phishing scams by clicking here.
It’s always important to be suspicious of any email received that asks for account information or redirects you to an official looking page asking for account information the company normally never asks for. Also, pay attention to the web addresses of pages when you click on links in email. Many will have similar looking URLs but be slightly off or contain subdomains of the business they’re impersonating. If you fear that you’ve been a victim of a recent phishing attempt, change your passwords immediately. In fact, it’s a good idea to change your passwords every ninety days.
Tags: american, criminal, cybercrime, egypt, egyptian, Hackers, identity theft, phishing, phishing scam, ring, us
