Paypal, Bank Of America Are Investigating Massive Fraud
 

PayPal Inc. and Bank of America Corp. say they are investigating claims by Sunbelt Software, an IT security company, that it has uncovered an online ID theft ring that has penetrated 50 U.S. and foreign banks and thousands of computers. "We're aware of the story and are investigating it," a Charlotte, NC-based Bank of America spokesperson tells CardLine. "We have been in contact with Sunbelt and are checking to see if any eBay or PayPal customers are affected," says a spokesperson for San Jose, CA-based PayPal, the online payments arm of eBay Inc. "If we find that they have been compromised, we will contact them." Eric Sites, Sunbelt's vice president of research, tells CardLine that the firm stumbled across the scam while investigating keystroke-logging software. He says the fraudsters are using keystroke-logging software to steal credit card numbers, social security numbers, passwords and other private information from infected computers. The spyware program gets planted on victims' computers when they visit a certain Web site. He declined to name the site. The stolen data is then hosted on a Web server, and contains sufficient information for fraudsters to be able to access bank accounts and credit card information. "The keystroke-logger that Sunbelt has uncovered is basically a backdoor program," Joseph Telafici, director of operations for McAfee Inc.'s Antivirus Vulnerability Emergency Response Team in Santa Clara, CA, tells CardLine. "A backdoor program sends data from an infected computer over the Net to a remote computer and modifies settings on the infected machine so that it can take control of it." The FBI's Tampa office is investigating the ID-theft ring. The FBI did not return calls. Sunbelt has been in touch with the banks affected by the scam, Sites says. Johannes Ullrich, a senior researcher at the SANS Institute, a Bethesda, MD-based IT security research group, tells CardLine that he believes Sunbelt's claims are genuine. "It is not that unusual to come across Web sites that contain stolen card or bank account data," he says. "But it is a lot of work to go through the data and pass it on to the authorities, which is what Sunbelt has done." Sunbelt is based in Clearwater, FL, and it has offices in the UK, France, Germany, Belgium and Sweden.

Over-use of paragraphs.

Something about Sweden

LOL

holy shit. thats down the street from me.

Special Agent Russell Hayes

Tampa gets most of the online cases due to the experience of the above agent.

I get about 10 bogus Paypal emails every day asking me to update my account info :)

Only 10? Damn you are lucky. I got 5 the last time I checked my mail, and I am sure there will be 2 or 3 more in the next 30 min.

But this is where the US governemnt needs to be spending money. Chasing assholes like that. Not the porn people.

I nearly logged into a fake Paypal site one day. I was checking my e-mail and being pretty absent minded. I've been using the internet for over a decade, I can't imagine what its like for these people who have limited computer skills.

Talk to CardLine, not to me.

What sucks about things like this is that it doesn't matter how much $$ the banking institutions spend on security, all it takes is some script kiddie installing a trojan on peoples PC's.

There should definitely be jail time for the people who write and distribute this spyware shit :321GFY

I thought you'd paragraph it yourself and deliver to my desk?

Yeah I just read about it on a swedish news site. The info goes through the spyware program Coolwebsearch.

Fucking idiot.

Thanks Kim for the update and info :)
TOM

is it something wrong with me or you just have no fuckin idea who are you talking with don't you ?

May PayPal rot in HELL!!!

I'm in troll mode tonight.

Congrats to Lenny2 the idiot for pissing me off a lot in a long while.
Fucking retard. Imprisoning programmers and security researchers because some kid decided to use a keylogger or their tools for illegal purposes, LOL, worthless fag.

Get those bogus emails every day, but I keep reporting them, and I think everybody else should do the same.

If we dont report it, they will never be able to se the whole size of this scam operation.

I think so far I have reported more than 40 ip's and domains used in this scam

Sunbelt has more news that they have not released yet. This is just the beginning :Oh crap

i hope those kinds of assholes get fucked in thier ass.

they are all probably skinny little geeks. hope bubba makes them his bitch!

ugh, I use pay pal and bank of america

Some of those fake PayPal pages are pretty well done.

I've seen ones that even modify the address bar so that it reads: https://www.paypal.com/blahblah (in IE, of course).

Bet a lot of people new to computing and the Net get tricked into many online scams.