The Top Internet Scams of 2007
Tuesday, 8 April 2008
Pets, romance, and secret shoppers.
They’re each among the top ruses used by Internet scam artists in 2007, according to a comprehensive report on online crime just issued by the Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3.
Here’s a rundown on how these scams generally work, along with other common frauds described in the report:
Pet Scams
- You see an online (or offline) ad selling a pet and send in your money, plus a little extra for delivery costs. But you never get the pet; the scam artist simply takes your money and runs.
- You’re selling a pet. You’re sent a check that’s actually more than your asking price. When you ask about the overpayment, you’re told it’s meant for someone else who will be caring for the pet temporarily. You’re asked to deposit the check and wire the difference to this other person. But the check bounces and you lose the money you sent to what turns out to be a fraudster.
Secret Shoppers and Funds Transfer Scams
- You’ve been hired via the web to rate your experiences while shopping or dining. You’re paid by check and asked to wire a percentage of the money to a third party. Like the pet scam, the check is bad and you’re out the money you sent. As part of the scam, the fraudsters often use (illegally) real logos from legitimate companies.
- While renting out a property, you’re sent a check that is more than your rental fee and asked to wire the difference to someone else (are you seeing a trend here?). Or you take a job that requires you to receive money from a company and redistribute funds to affiliates via wire.
Adoption and Charity Frauds
- You get a spam e-mail that tugs on your heartstrings, asking for a pressing donation to a charity and often using the subject header, “Urgent Assistance is Needed.” The name of a real charity is generally used, but the money is really going to a con artist. One set of scams in 2007, for example, used the name of a legitimate British adoption agency to ask for money for orphaned or abandoned children.
Romance Fraud
- You encounter someone in an online dating or social networking site who lives far away or in another country. That person strikes up a relationship with you and then wants to meet, but needs money to cover travel expenses. Typically, that’s just the beginning—the person may end up in the hospital during the trip or get mugged and need more money, etc.
Fraud stats. The report provides a complete breakdown of statistics on Internet crime in 2007. For the year, total complaints were down slightly with 206,884 submissions, but total losses were at their highest level ever, nearly $240 million. See the report for plenty more details about victims, perpetrators, and common categories of complaints.
IC3, a joint venture of the FBI and the non-profit National White Collar Crime Center, serves as a central federal clearinghouse for all reports of Internet crime.
Logging a complaint is easy: just go to the IC3 website, click on “File a Complaint,” type in the details, and hit “next.” Review your information and click on “submit” when you’re ready to send. The good folks at IC3 will take it from there. Thru FBI
Posted by Gaurav Shukla 04:08 0 comments
Labels: Internet scams
From FBI Archives: An Odd Couple of Crime
Wednesday, 20 February 2008
The days of the big-name bank robbers—John Dillinger, “Baby Face” Nelson, “Pretty Boy” Floyd, and the like—were long gone when a pair of enterprising, dangerous, and slightly offbeat crooks arrived on the scene in the early 1960s. But within a few years, they’d be as wanted as any of the gun-slinging bank robbers of the gangster era.
Their names were Albert Nussbaum and Bobby Wilcoxson, and before they were locked away for good, they’d robbed eight banks, accumulated a massive arsenal of weapons, murdered a bank guard, and set off several bombs in the nation’s capital.
The two men were a study in contrasts. Nussbaum was quiet and clever, a thinker and a planner. He was a student of crime, devouring books on explosives, electronics, criminal investigations, and firearms. An entrepreneur of sorts, he used his ill-gotten gains to set up several companies. He was the “brains” of the pair. Wilcoxson, on the other hand, supplied the “brawn.” During their robberies, he was the one barking orders and brandishing the heavy weapons.
The two had become friends in an Ohio prison and hooked up after they were released. They robbed their first bank in Buffalo in December 1960, with Wilcoxson wielding a sawed-off shotgun that Nussbaum had cleverly hidden under his partner’s winter coat by drilling a hole in the barrel and tying it around Wilcoxson’s shoulder with a shoelace.
In June 1961, they made their first big mistake. Nussbaum built his own homemade bombs, which he planned to use to distract law enforcement while the two robbed a bank in Washington, D.C. They set off two test bombs successfully, sending the police scrambling. But the third bomb failed to detonate, and FBI lifted Nussbaum’s fingerprints from it. Still, the pair went ahead and robbed the bank anyway.
It was their fifth robbery in December 1961 that put them on FBI's “Top Ten” fugitive list. Desperate for money, Nussbaum and Wilcoxson cased a bank in Brooklyn, but realized that they’d have to knock off the bank guard to make it work. Their plan—which included a new recruit named Peter Curry—went horribly awry. After Wilcoxson killed the guard with four blasts from his Thompson submachine gun, a fleeing customer alerted police. Wilcoxson got into a gun battle with one officer, who was wounded but survived. All three criminals got away, barely, but Curry was arrested within two months. He told FBI what he knew about Nussbaum and Wilcoxson and led us to the countryside in Buffalo, where the pair had hidden a massive cache of weapons.
At that point, FBI search heated up. The two men, along with Wilcoxson’s girlfriend Jackie Rose, became national fugitives and were forced into hiding. They began using aliases and wearing disguises. Still, they committed three more robberies.
In the end, the two men had a falling out and went their separate ways. Nussbaum contacted his estranged wife in desperation. Her mother called FBI, and the wife reluctantly agreed to help FBI catch him. Following a wild car chase, FBI arrested Nussbaum on November 4, 1962. FBI caught up with Wilcoxson and Rose, living together with their young child, six days later.
Both Nussbaum and Wilcoxson ultimately pled guilty. In February 1964—44 years ago this month—they were sentenced to life in prison. CREDITS: FBI
Posted by Gaurav Shukla 04:29 0 comments
Labels: From The FBI Archives
Interpol issues arrest warrants for suspects in alleged illegal kidney ring
Friday, 1 February 2008
The alleged ringleader of a massive kidney harvesting ring and believed to have ties to Canada is the subject of an international manhunt after Interpol issued a red notice warrant for him and one of his colleagues late Thursday.
Amit Kumar, 40, and Jeevan Rawat, 36, are the subject of red notices posted on the international policing organization's website.
They are wanted in India on counts of "illegal transplanting of kidneys, cheating and criminal conspiracy."
Police have alleged that Kumar is the ringleader of the kidney harvesting operation, and media reports in India quote police as saying Kumar has family in Canada and could have fled to this country.
Prem Prakash, the senior superintendent of Moradabad police, told The Hindu newspaper that Kumar has Canadian ties.
"It is only speculation that he has fled to Canada," he said. "He has relatives in that country as one of his wives is staying there with their kids."
Canadian officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
Indian police discovered the kidney harvesting ring in Gurgaon, where they allege 500 people had their organs forcibly removed over eight years.
Police allege the kidneys were then used to provide transplants to foreigners.
The Associated Press reported that while some donors willingly sold their kidneys for as much as $2,250, many were lured to operation sites, held at gunpoint and ultimately forced to undergo the procedure.
Mohammed Salim, who was rescued during a police raid, said he was promised paid construction work as well as food and lodging, but found himself held prisoner in a house where his kidney was removed against his will.
"I don't know how I will survive," Salim told The Associated Press from a hospital bed. "I am the only earner in the family and the doctors said I can't do heavy work."
There long have been reports of poor Indians illegally selling kidneys, but the transplant racket in Gurgaon is one of the most extensive to come to light - and the first with an element of so-called medical tourism.
The low cost of medical care in India has made it a popular destination for foreigners in need of everything from tummy tucks to heart surgery.
Credits: Canadian Press
Posted by Gaurav Shukla 07:38 0 comments
Labels: Intelligence Agencies, Interpol
FBI Agent Gets to the Truth; Interviewing Saddam
Thursday, 31 January 2008
Imagine sitting across from Saddam Hussein every day for nearly seven straight months—slowly earning his trust, getting him to spill secrets on everything from whether he gave the order to gas the Kurds (he did) to whether he really did have weapons of mass destruction on the eve of war (he didn’t). All the while gathering information that would ultimately be used to prosecute the deposed dictator in an Iraqi court.
That was the job of FBI Special Agent George Piro, who told his story Sunday, January 27, on the TV news program 60 Minutes.
Soon after U.S. special forces pulled Saddam out of a spider hole on December 13, 2003, the CIA—knowing the former dictator would ultimately have to answer for his crimes against the Iraqi people—asked the FBI to debrief Hussein because of our longstanding work in gathering statements for court.
That’s when we turned to Piro, an investigator on our terrorism fly team who was born in Beirut and speaks Arabic fluently. Piro was supported by a team of CIA analysts and FBI agents, intelligence analysts, language specialists, and a behavioral profiler.
Piro knew getting Saddam to talk wouldn’t be easy. He prepped by carefully studying the former dictator’s life so he could better connect with Saddam and more easily determine when he was being honest. It worked: during the first interview on January 13, 2004, Piro talked about Saddam’s four novels and Iraqi history, which impressed Hussein. Saddam asked for Piro to come back.
From that day forward, everything Piro did was designed to build an emotional bond with Saddam and to get him to talk truthfully. To make Hussein dependent on him and him alone, Piro became responsible for virtually every aspect of his life, including his personal needs. He always treated Saddam with respect, knowing he would not respond to threats or tough tactics. As part of his plan, Piro also never told Hussein that he was an FBI field agent, instead letting him believe, for the sake of building credibility, that he was a high-level official who reported directly to the President.
It took time. Piro spent five to seven hours a day with Saddam for months, taking advantage of every small opportunity that presented itself, including listening to Hussein’s poetry. Eventually, Saddam began to open up.
Among Saddam’s revelations:
Saddam misled the world into believing that he had weapons of mass destruction in the months leading up to the war because he feared another invasion by Iran, but he did fully intend to rebuild his WMD program.
Piro told 60 Minutes that Saddam considered Usama bin Laden “a fanatic” and a threat who couldn’t be trusted.
The former dictator admitted “initially miscalculating President Bush and President Bush’s intentions,” Piro said, thinking the war would be more like the shortened air campaign of the Gulf War.
Saddam never used look-alikes or body doubles as widely believed, thinking no one could really play his part.
Hussein made the decision to invade neighboring Kuwait in 1990 following an insulting comment by one of its emirs.
Piro was so successful at befriending Saddam that the former dictator was visibly moved when they said goodbye. “I saw him tear up,” Piro said during the television interview.
Joe Persichini, Assistant Director in Charge of our Washington office and Piro’s boss, told 60 Minutes that Piro’s expert work in revealing Saddam’s secrets was “probably one of the top accomplishments of the agency in the last 100 years.”
To watch or read the full interview of George Piro, visit the 60 Minutes website.
Credits: FBI
Posted by Gaurav Shukla 05:24 0 comments
Labels: From The FBI Archives
Tablighi Jamaat: An Indirect Line to Terrorism
By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart
Spanish police conducted a series of raids on apartment buildings, a mosque
and a prayer hall in Barcelona on Jan. 19, seizing bombmaking materials and
arresting 14 men who allegedly were planning to attack targets in the city.
Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said the detainees were
Islamists belonging to a "well-organized group that had gone a step beyond
radicalization."
A Muslim leader in Barcelona was quoted in some media reports as saying the
14 suspects - 12 Pakistanis, an Indian and a Bangladeshi - were members of a
"Pakistani-based group called Tablighi Jamaat."
The Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) name has come up before in connection with
terrorism plots, including the October 2002 Portland Seven and the September
2002 Lackawanna Six cases in the United States, as well as the August 2006
plot to bomb airliners en route from London to the United States, the July
7, 2005, London Underground bombings and the July 2007 attempted bombings in
London and Glasgow, Scotland. Over the past several years we also have
received several queries about TJ from U.S. law enforcement officials who
are concerned about the group's presence and activities in the United
States.
This, then, is a good time to correct some of the erroneous information
regarding TJ - and attempt to paint a realistic portrait of the very real
threat posed by some of the people affiliated with TJ.
Tablighi Jamaat
The Tablighi Jamaat (Group for Preaching) movement was established in Mewat,
India, in 1927 and stems from the Deobandi brand of the Hanafi Sunni school
of jurisprudence. Deobandi is the most commonly practiced form of Islam in
South Asia, and TJ is but a small subset of the larger Deobandi community.
TJ was designed to be an apolitical, pietistic organization that sends
missionaries across the globe on proselytizing missions intended to bring
wayward Muslims back to more orthodox practices of Islam.
TJ followers (Tablighis) are mostly of South Asian origin, though there are
Tablighis from many different ethnic and national backgrounds. In fact, TJ
operates in 150 countries and has an estimated 70 million to 80 million
active followers, making it the largest Muslim movement in the world. Its
annual gatherings in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh reportedly bring
together the largest congregations of Muslims in the world outside of the
Hajj. The group's stated mission is to work at a grassroots level, reaching
out to Muslims across the social and economic spectrum. Tablighis do not
solicit or receive donations, but rather are largely funded by senior
members.
At face value, TJ is a peaceful, egalitarian and devotional movement that
stresses individual faith and overall spiritual development. In a sense, TJ
is a widespread training system that urges average Muslims to examine their
own lives and become involved in calling their fellow Muslims back to
orthodox Islam. Because of TJ's tactics, some Islamist groups refer to its
members as "Muslim Jehovah's Witnesses" and accuse them of abandoning
politics and jihad. Upon joining the movement, Tablighi recruits are given
the option of attending the Tablighi center in the Pakistani city of
Raiwind, near Lahore, Pakistan, for four months of additional religious
training to equip them to preach the Tablighi message.
It is important to understand that TJ is a loosely controlled mass movement
rather than a centralized group, as some would maintain. Although TJ
operates mosques, it has no fixed membership and Tablighis are free to leave
the movement. The mosques are used to support the efforts of the independent
jamaat (groups of 10 preachers) that undertake preaching missions. The type
of work performed and the duration of that work are left solely to the
discretion and conscience of the individual jamaat. Some jamaat choose to
serve a short period of time while others preach for months or even years.
Although TJ is Deobandi, it allows any Sunni Muslim to join in its
missionary work as long as that person accepts the group's austere creed.
Because of the large number of South Asian Muslims in the United Kingdom, TJ
is very strong in that country. The Tablighi-run Markazi Mosque in Dewsbury,
West Yorkshire, is the group's European headquarters. The organization's
strength in Britain was demonstrated in 2007 when it announced plans to
construct an 18-acre mosque complex in Stratford, East London, on a site
near the 2012 Olympic Park. According to some reports, the new complex would
have a capacity of up to 70,000 people, making it the largest religious
building in the United Kingdom and the largest mosque in Europe. The
construction of such an enormous mosque has raised some concerns and more
than a bit of controversy among the British people. The organization,
however, also has a presence in most other European countries, while French
authorities have claimed that 80 percent of the radical Islamists they have
encountered have had some sort of contact with the TJ movement.
In the United States, the FBI believes some 50,000 people are associated
with TJ missions, while Tablighi mosques currently operate in several U.S.
states, including California, Texas and New York. The Al-Falah Mosque in the
Corona area of Queens, N.Y., apparently is the group's North American
headquarters.
The Wahhabi/Salafi Myth
In addition to the misconception that TJ is a hierarchical group, perhaps
the second most commonly held misconception about the Tablighis is that they
adhere to a Wahhabi branch of Islam. In much the same way that there are
different denominations of Christians, there are several different branches
and sub-branches of Islam. Wahhabism, sometimes also referred to as
Salafism, is an orthodox belief system held by the Saudi ruling family and
most people in Saudi Arabia. Wahhabism also is the form of Islam practiced
by al Qaeda and many militant jihadist groups.
In fact, the Deobandi Tablighis often are severely criticized by orthodox
religious authorities (ulema), such as Sunni Wahhabi ulema in Saudi Arabia,
who have issued fatwa prohibiting the Tablighis from preaching in the
country and banning Tablighi literature from being imported into the
country. The Wahhabi ulema have issued rulings declaring Tablighis to be
deviants and forbidding participation in Tablighi activities unless the
reason for the participation is to criticize the Tablighis for their deviant
beliefs.
Remember that not all Wahhabi or Salafi Muslims are jihadists and not all
radical Islamists are Wahhabi/Salafi - or even Sunni for that matter. Many
groups ascribing to a jihadist theology, such as the Taliban, are Deobandi.
Hezbollah is a Shiite organization, while Jamaat al Fuqra has Sufi leanings.
Tablighis also are heavily criticized by militant Deobandi Islamists, such
as the Taliban, Kashmiri militant groups, anti-Shiite sectarian militant
groups and Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI) for their apolitical stance regarding
the war on terrorism, which many Muslims perceive as a war against Islam.
Tablighi theology stresses that Muslims must first devote themselves to
becoming good, practicing Muslims in their own personal lives, rather than
struggling for political power or even protesting oppression by non-Muslims.
This focus on the inner person first is the opposite approach to that taken
by radical Islamists, who seek to seize political power through force and
then form an Islamic state or caliphate that can impose Shariah law on the
individual. Because of this, some Islamist militants accuse the Tablighis of
being a tool of the Jews and Hindus because they deny the need for a
physical jihad and focus on the "greater jihad," which is the inner struggle
for faith and piety.
The Tablighi Role in the Global Jihadism
However, there are indeed some links between Tablighis and the world of
jihadism. First, there is evidence of indirect connections between the group
and the wider radical/extremist Deobandi nexus composed of anti-Shiite
sectarian groups, Kashmiri militants and the Taliban. This link provides a
medium through which Tablighis who are disgruntled with the group's
apolitical program could break orbit and join militant organizations.
One apparent manifestation of this nexus was a purported militant offshoot
of TJ, Jihad bi al-Saif (Jihad through the Sword), which was established in
Taxila, Pakistan. Members of this group were accused of plotting a coup
against former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 1995. Yet, because
of the organization's extreme secrecy, little is known about it other than
that it is believed to have developed in reaction to the TJ's apolitical,
peaceful stance.
The TJ organization also serves as a de facto conduit for Islamist
extremists and for groups such as al Qaeda to recruit new members.
Significantly, the Tablighi recruits do intersect with the world of radical
Islamism when they travel to Pakistan to receive their initial training. We
have received reports that once the recruits are in Pakistan,
representatives of various radical Islamist groups, such as
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the Taliban and al Qaeda, are said to woo them
actively - to the point of offering them military training. And some of them
accept the offer. For example, John Walker Lindh - an American who is
serving a prison sentence for aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan - traveled
with Tablighi preachers to Pakistan in 1998 to further his Islamic studies
before joining the Taliban.
Because of the piety and strict belief system of the Tablighis and their
focus on calling wayward Muslims back to an austere and orthodox Muslim
faith, the movement has offered a place where jihadist spotters can look for
potential recruits. These facilitators often offer enthusiastic new or
rededicated Muslims a more active way to live and develop their faith.
Although the TJ promotes a benign message, the same conservative Islamic
values espoused by the Tablighis also are part of jihadist ideology, and so
some Muslims attracted to the Tablighi movement are enticed into becoming
involved with jihadists.
Additionally, because of its apolitical belief system, TJ seems to leave a
gap in the ideological indoctrination of the individual Tablighi because it
essentially asks the novice to shun politics and public affairs. The problem
in taking this belief system from theory to practice, however, is that some
people find they cannot ignore what is happening in the world around them,
especially when that world includes wars. This is when some Tablighis become
disillusioned with TJ and start turning to jihadist groups that offer
religiously sanctioned prescriptions as to how "good Muslims" should deal
with life's injustices.
Once a facilitator identifies such candidates, he often will segregate them
from the main congregation in the mosque or community center and put them
into small prayer circles or study groups where they can be more easily
exposed to jihadist ideology. (Of course, it also has been shown that a
person with friends or relatives who ascribe to radical ideology can more
easily be radical).
Examples of people making the jump from TJ to radical Islam are the two
leading members of the cell responsible for the July 7, 2005, London
bombings - Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shahzad Tanweer. Both had
life-changing experiences through their exposure to TJ, though by 2001 the
men had left the Tablighi mosque they had been attending in the British city
of Beeston, because they found it to be too apolitical. They apparently were
frustrated by the mosque's elders, who forbid the discussion of politics in
the mosque.
After Khan and Tanweer left the Tablighi mosque, they began attending the
smaller Iqra Learning Center bookstore in Beeston, where they reportedly
were exposed to frequent political discussions about places such as Iraq,
Kashmir and Chechnya. The store's proprietors reportedly even produced jihad
videos depicting crimes by the West against the Muslim world. Exposed to
this environment, the two men eventually became radicalized to the point of
traveling to Pakistan to attend a terrorist training camp and then returning
to the United Kingdom to plan and execute a suicide attack that resulted in
the death of them both.
TJ also is used by jihadists as cover both for recruiting activities, as
discussed above, and for travel. Like Khan and Tanweer, many jihadists
desire to travel to Pakistan for training, while others want to get to
Afghanistan, Kashmir or other places to fight jihad. However, the travel
environment is far different today than it was in the early 1980s, when 747
jetliners packed with jihadists from Saudi Arabia and other places flew into
Pakistan en route to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Foreigners traveling to Pakistan today cannot enter the country without a
visa, and Pakistani authorities are no longer inclined to issue visas to
jihadists, as Jeffrey Battle and the other members of the Portland Seven had
to learn the hard way. Shortly after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the
friends traveled to China with the intention of entering Afghanistan by way
of Pakistan. Once at the Chinese-Pakistani border, however, they found they
could not enter Pakistan without a visa. After spending a frustrating month
trying to obtain visas from the Pakistani Embassy in Beijing, the seven
aspiring jihadists decided to go their separate ways.
Battle, who reportedly once served as a bodyguard for Black Panther leader
Quanell X, later attempted to obtain a visa to Pakistan by saying he was
affiliated with TJ. The Pakistanis, probably recognizing him from his prior
(and apparently somewhat vocal) visa attempts, denied him again, though he
was able to get a visa to travel to Bangladesh using the feigned connection
to TJ. Unable to make his way from Bangladesh to Pakistan or Afghanistan,
however, Battle returned to the United States, where he was later arrested.
He was sentenced to 18 years in prison after pleading guilty to charges of
seditious conspiracy and waging war against the United States.
Similarly, in the spring of 2001 the members of the so-called Lackawanna Six
cell traveled to Pakistan under the pretext of studying the Islamic religion
and culture at the TJ training center. In reality, the men traveled through
Pakistan to Afghanistan, where they attended training at the al-Farooq camp,
a training site being run by al Qaeda. Again, the men used TJ as cover for
travel, though there is no indication that TJ played any real part in their
alleged plot.
Although the TJ organization unintentionally serves as a front for, or
conduit to, militant organizations such as al Qaeda, there is no evidence
that the Tablighis act willingly as a global unified jihadist recruiting
arm. Rather, such activities appear to occur without the knowledge or
consent of TJ leaders. Additionally, because of the very size of the
organization and it activities in Muslim communities in the West, a great
many Muslims have had some sort of contact with the group. TJ itself,
however, is not an intentional propagator of terrorism.
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Posted by Gaurav Shukla 04:55 1 comments
Labels: Intelligence News, Terror Outfits
