How Cell Phone Money Laundering Works 39
Orome1 writes "In Russia, most cell phone SIM cards are prepaid. One of the major Russian operators offers a legal service that allows anyone to transfer the prepaid amount of money from a SIM card to a bank account, a credit card, another cell phone number (via a text message) or to express money transfer service Unistream. This particular service is heavily misused by cyber crooks who use it to launder money collected through ransomware campaigns, mobile malware and SMS scam campaigns. Kaspersky Lab's Denis Maslennikov takes us though the steps of each of these types of scams and shares insights into the shady economy that has sprung up due to cyber criminals' need to get their hand on the collected money without leaving a direct trail."
Ingenius way of laundering money (Score:3, Interesting)
there are charities and fake sob stories just as ones mentioned in the podcast above. Or people get malware/keyloggers and hackers gain access to their second life accounts and either people under guise of charity or by hack have their 'lindens' transferred out to bot accounts. lindens is also the name of the in world currency. And second life offers a linden exchange where they convert all lindens to us dollars and transfer it to paypal. usually ay a 266-270 linden to $1 conversion rate.
I myself sell scripts in second life to augment my income and through scripts and real estate renting to others I transfer about 300-500 us dollars per month to paypal then on to my bank account.
but I've heard many horror stories of hackers doing the exact same tricks mentioned in the podcast in Second life for stealing then laundering the cash out.