Making the process of fraud even simpler

[JohnC]

Scammers are constantly looking for ways to make it even easier to steal your personal information and verify it. Whether it is stolen through phishing scams distributed via email, or perhaps banking trojans distributed through web browser exploits. It doesn't really matter how the information is stolen, it just matters that people are made aware of the dangers. It doesn't even need to take place online, if somebody has your phone number or physical address they can easily write to you or phone you in an effort to social engineer your credentials from you. Or if you pay for something on a credit card in a restaurant, who really knows if your card was skimmed (skimming is the process of using special equipment to swipe a card and make an exact copy of it).

Once a cyber criminal has a lot of email addresses and passwords used to login to websites such as ebay and paypal, they will need a method to verify the login details are correct. It appears that there are tools available to these fraudsters to automate the process. I have come across two tools to do exactly this. The first is to verify login details of MoneyBookers accounts, as can be seen from the picture:



This uses several files, like a file for socks proxies, a file for the login details and a settings file to control the way it works. Rather a simple GUI right? The next one which is for PayPal has a few extra features.



Again this uses several files, for socks, login details etc. The paypal account verifier even comes with a little tool to register it so that only the person that paid for it can use it. Are fraudsters becoming more sophisticated? Well, chances are that most of the fraudsters that get there hands on this wouldn't have the ability to write something like this, even though it is more than likely not that complex. Generally as with all things like this, one person creates it and sells it then the people that bought it try to sell it. Having tools like this readily available to scammers certainly creates more of a problem though, as it would have taken them longer to check all the accounts manually before. So this would give them more time to try scamming people.