Belarusian fraudster Dmitry M. Naskovets has been pled guilty to charges that he set up a boiler-room full of English- and German-speaking con-artists who worked with identity thieves to defraud banks and their depositors. I often think that broken English is actually a serious advantage in blog-spam; my personal sites get hammered by this stuff, but I also get a fair bit of non-native English speakers posting, and it's a lot harder to figure out whether the stilted post is someone's goofy SEO scheme or just a Bulgarian who's using Google Translate to help post something rather nice.
Identity Theft Support CenterIn June 2007, Naskovet, and coconspirator Sergey Semasko, also a Belarusian national, created CallService.biz to counteract security measures put in place by financial institutions to prevent fraud when account holders try to make transfers or withdrawals from their accounts. In exchange for a fee, the two men provided the services of English- and German-speaking individuals to persons who had stolen account and biographical information to defeat the security screening processes. Using information provided by the identity thieves over the site, the callers would confirm unauthorized withdrawals or transfers from bank accounts, unblock accounts, or change the address or phone number associated with an account, thereby giving the thieves access.
Operator of 'Support Center' Assisting over 2,000 Identity Thieves Pleads Guilty
(via /.)
(Image: Identity Thief, Incognito, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from carbonnyc's photostream)
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