FBI, Dutch Police Disrupt ‘Manipulaters’ Phishing Gang
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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.