FBI: Fictitious Law Firms Targeting Cryptocurrency Scam Victims Combine Multiple Exploitation Tactics While Offering to Recover Funds


This updated advisory provides additional red flag indicators and due diligence measures to help victims who have been in contact with fictitious law firms conducting this fraudulent activity.

This scheme combines a number of exploitation tactics including targeting vulnerable populations, particularly the elderly; exploiting victims’ emotional state and financial need to recover funds from a previous scam; and giving victims the sense of safety and security by impersonating or falsely affiliating themselves with multiple government entities. Contact with scammers impersonating law firms continue to pose many risks, including the theft of personal data and funds from unsuspecting victims to the reputational harm of actual lawyers being impersonated.

Read more…
Source: U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation Cyber Division


Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox


Related:

  • Popular Samsung, LG Android Phones Open to ‘Spearphone’ Eavesdropping

    July 23, 2019

    A Spearphone attacker can use the accelerometer in LG and Samsung phones to remotely eavesdrop on any audio that’s played on speakerphone, including calls, music and voice assistant responses. A new way to eavesdrop on people’s mobile phone calls has come to light in the form of Spearphone – an attack that makes use of Android ...

  • On the IoT road: perks, benefits and security of moving smartly

    July 22, 2019

    Kaspersky has repeatedly investigated security issues related to IoT technologies (for instance, here, or here). Earlier this year our experts have even gained foothold in the security of biomechanical prosthetic devices. The same implies to smart car security: our own research has indicated that there are number of issues—look here or here. This year, we decided to continue our tradition of small-scale experiments with security ...

  • Critical RCE Flaw in Palo Alto Gateways Hits Uber

    July 22, 2019

    A remote code-execution (RCE) vulnerability has been uncovered in the GlobalProtect portal and GlobalProtect Gateway interface security products from Palo Alto Networks. It’s an unusual zero-day case, having been previously unknown but inadvertently fixed in later releases — but some large companies could still be impacted, including Uber. The gateways provide virtual private network (VPN) access to ...

  • French army will employ sci-fi writers to predict cyber threats

    July 22, 2019

    The French military is to assemble a team of science fiction writers to imagine possible future cyber threats and inject innovation into cyber defence. This will be a small group, known as the “Red Team” which will be comprised of four or five science fiction writers and or futurists. The team will be hired to “propose ...

  • Old Tools for New Money: URL Spreading Shellbot and XMRig Using 17-year old XHide

    July 19, 2019

    One of our honeypots detected a threat that propagates by scanning for open ports and brute forcing weak credentials, installing a Monero cryptocurrency miner and a Perl-based IRC backdoor as the final payload. The miner process is hidden using XHide Process Faker, a 17-year old open source tool used to fake the name of a ...

  • Iran-Linked APT34 Invites Victims to LinkedIn for Fresh Malware Infections

    July 19, 2019

    A recent phishing campaign by Iran-linked threat actor APT34 made use of a savvy approach: Asking victims to join their social network. According to FireEye, the adversaries masqueraded as a Cambridge University lecturer, including setting up a LinkedIn page, in order to gain victims’ trust. From there the attackers asked their “friends” to open malicious documents. APT34, ...