Summary

  • The FBI and Dutch police have seized servers and domains used by a popular service in Pakistan called ‘The Manipulators’ for spam and malware dispersal.
  • The servers contained data on millions of victims worldwide, including at least 100,000 records related to Dutch citizens.
  • US authorities refer to the cybercrime group behind it as ‘Saim Raza’, a pseudonym used to promote the services on social media.
  • The group’s core product was ‘Heartsender**’, a service to facilitate the delivery of spam with phishing kits targeting users of various internet companies.
  • The US DOJ said that transnational organised crime groups predominantly used the services to run business email compromise (BEC) schemes, tricking victim companies into making payments to a third party, which were then redirected to perpetrators’ financial accounts.
  • The fraud also involved stealing user credentials and utilising them to further fraudulent schemes.
  • Dutch police said that their investigation into the owners and customers of the service is ongoing.

Original Article