Say you’ve just scammed someone out of all their financial details using an online fraud, but now you need to call up their bank and impersonate them, and you don’t speak their language, have the wrong accent, or are of a different gender — what do you do?
You sign up witn a criminal phone bank, like Callmebaby, that charges less than $15/call to ring up people and pretend to be your victim, in a variety of languages and gender. Just fill in all the details necessary for the con and away you go — but be sure you fill in all the details, there’s no refund if your fraud-helper can’t complete the con because you left out a crucial element.
The ads for these services are bizarre. One features a sexy white lady conning Obama; another features Ed Snowden being smooched by a pair of bikini models. Bizarrely, there’s a leaked version of an ad that includes the whole process from sketch to completion.
One of the cybercrime underground’s oldest call center services — CallMeBaby — serves a variety of swindles but specializes in helping criminals cash out dating scams. It charges $10 for each call in English, and $12 for calls in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish. Here’s an ad for the four-year-old service, which features an illustration of a blonde woman chatting with President Obama.
CallMeBaby advertises the availability of a male and female to impersonate anyone in the above-supported languages, and operates between the hours of 17:00 to 03:00 Moscow time (business hours in America).
The CallMeBaby Web-based service, pictured below, includes a “urgent” button where paying customers in a special hurry can expedite calls for an extra fee. “Sparta,” the nickname of the cybercrook who runs the service, warns customers that if the call service has to make a second call to complete the transaction because of insufficient information provided by the customer, that customer will be charged twice.
A Look Inside Cybercriminal Call Centers
[Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security]
