Cyber-Laundry?

No, this isn't about the place you take your 'virtual clothes' to be cleaned in 'cyber-space' or 'virtual worlds' such as 'Second-Life'. It is about something quite different.

I have recently been seeing e-mails claiming to be from a firm called 'Draper Investment Company LLC'. A screenshot of one of the many e-mails I have so far received from them appears below:



Clicking on the link in the e-mail takes you to the following very professional looking site, complete with a 'Flash' [SWF] banner:



If you click on the second link in the e-mail, the one that claims to take you to the 'application form', then this is what you'll see:



If you were in need of a part-time job, to fit around your family, or if you were a starving student, you may well be tempted to apply. I mean, the rates look 'very' good for very little of your time, in fact they seem almost 'too good to be true', and that should be setting off little alarm-bells in your head. But, just in case it hasn't done so, what does the 'Site Advisor' from 'McAfee' make of the site, let's see:



Well, are you still tempted now? can you hear the alarm-bells now? No? Well, let's see what 'Netcraft' has to say about the site, shall we?:



Still interested? Nope, I thought not. But, just in case you were, you should be aware of the following, as you are not only aiding and abetting cyber-criminals in laundering money stolen from accounts acquired via Phishing, you may also be helping to fund 'International Terrorists' too! Yes, that's right, you could be unwittingly helping 'Terrorist' groups, like 'Al Qaeda' and others of their ilk.

Both the Netcraft Anti-Phishing-Toolbar and the McAfee SiteAdvisor are FREE browser plugins which work with not only IE [Internet Explorer] but also Firefox. Neither are a 'Silver Bullet' for the Phishing and related Cyber-crime problem, but they are useful in the fight against the scumbags that try to either steal your identity or try and get you to work for them. In other words, these tools just might help to stop you being taken to the cleaners, or being one of the cleaners.

So, in summary, you would be working as a 'Mule' and 'Laundering' stolen funds, you do know what a 'Mule' is don't you?

The answer is this:
We are not talking about four legged creatures that are half horse and half donkey....think more of drug couriers who are more usually referred to as Mules!

Now, in most cases Mules are those that either carry things for others [hence the use of the term] or act as laundering points, such as in organized crime syndicates, they do the dirty work of moving material from A to B and usually have little or no idea what what they are doing is illegal. They may even be acting as a Mule under duress, such as blackmail, etc.

There have been a number of people who have recently been recruited as Mules by the Phishers to help process the funds stolen during the latest Phishing Trawl, but the Mule doesn't know that they are helping criminals... They believe that they have a 'real' job helping financial companies with 'excess' workload or helping to test the companies security by logging in using the stolen credentials and moving money to other accounts...scary huh?

In fact, because the cyber-criminals behind the Phishing and other Identity-Theft crimes have been so successful, they have more data than they can easily deal with. This is why they are now trying so hard to recruit 'you' as a money-mule or cyber-launderer.

Of course, when the authorities catch up with the Mules and they are arrested and charged, they are often shocked that they had been so naive and feel rather 'used'.

So next time you see a job ad on the web, in the local paper or receive a job offer via e-mail, stop and think is this really legit, or am I about to be turned into a mule...