FinancialCrimeRiskOfficers.com

Greetings,

I hope my email will arrive to you at good time. My name is Sufian Allaw
from Damascus Syria. I was the former oil minister of Syria Republic.

Oh, good grief. Surely God doesn't have much to do with this idiot.

A deferred prosecution is a device used by prosecutors to allow suspected criminals to buy what amounts to a judicially approved arrangement to avoid prosecution so long as the accused meets certain conditions for a certain period of time. Critics (of which this newspaper is one) see it as a bribe; supporters see it as a way of compelling the accused to do whatever it is that the prosecuting authority wants. Developed in the USA, there is a global move towards adoption of this tactic. The former head of the UK's Serious Fraud Office was a fan; he's been replaced by an American who has been immersed in this system. How's it going?

The logic failures in some spam-scams are astounding. This one is so stupid that we just had to tell you about it.

It's obviously fake. But anything that uses mail at AOL is bound to attract attention. And MoneyGram is used to further enhance the credibility of this fraud that uses the pressure points of IMF and offshore accounts, beneficiaries and.. oh, just read it.

Kenneth A. Blanco, Director, FinCEN (The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the USA's FIU and a division of the Department of the Treasury) sets out how Bank Secrecy Act data, including "convertible virtual currencies."

The USA's cyber-security agency, US-CERT, has issued an alert relating Dridex Malware which targets the financial sector. It follows work by various government departments including FinCEN.

The UK's National Crime Agency is on a roll. It's taken a while for the successor to so many different organisations to get its act properly together, demonstrating the constant shuffling around of people and responsibilities detracts from their ability to do the job. The men and women of the NCA are a hard-working and bright bunch and recent results show that if they are left to their own devices, and given time to execute sensible plans, they do exactly as they are supposed to do: get convictions, often where they were apparently unlikely. One, yesterday, makes the point nicely.

This follow up to the article about a crypto-asset trading fraud being promoted on LinkedIn shows the persistence of the fraudsters.

(updates as to telephone numbers and emails will be added to this article from time to time)

UPDATE 200191120: disturbing find: a paid-for advert on LinkedIn which is therefore profiting from this fraud.

We all know that getting any kind of new project off the ground is a complex, stressful and potentially ruinous venture. So, while there are those that spend their own capital, sweat equity, there are those that seek funding in the forms of loans or investment. So what happened when two New Jersey men decided to bootstrap their proposed development of a leisure complex with bunker-like, "doomsday", apartments designed to withstand every thing from biological threats to a nuclear winter?

What top level domains are at the heart of most of the spam that comes into your servers? Here's our current top three ....

This might just be the e-mail that launches a million problems, or more. It is incredibly simple and extremely sneaky. And it passes some anti-spam filters.

There's more than USD2,000 million in moneys clawed back from fraudulent deals.

Oh, wait. It's a spam-scam. And it wants you to send your identification documents "via" a telephone number. Genius.

It all looks so viable: Henry Golding, the star of the fantastically successful film "Crazy Rich Asians", in an interview with the very credible Singapore newspaper The Straits Times, says he's making shed loads of money in an automated trading scheme endorsed by, amongst others, Bill Gates. And it's floated around LinkedIn for a while. We took a look.

Following an earlier statement (here) Malindo Air has given more details of how its data breach came about.