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Odd Canadian Interest In Money Laundering
David Utter
Staff Writer
2008-02-20
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Online enticements to engage in money laundering appear to have a following among Canadians, thanks to certain laws in the country.
 | | Odd Canadian Interest In Money Laundering |  |
There is no dancing around the point for sites that want to find people to pass money through a couple of channels and clean it up. As security vendor F-Secure noted, the call to action resides at the top of one such site they observed: "I have large amount of funds on numerous bank accounts which needs to be laundered."
F-Secure quickly discovered a connection between the money laundering forum and the Storm botnet, which pushed out spams to bring people to the site. They also noted the scammers use fast-flux hosting to try and avoid detection.
The "paid to receive bank transfers" sites run on the phpBB forum software, and F-Secure noticed the majority of people leaving messages on the forum listed themselves as Canadian. That struck F-Secure as odd, but there seems to be a reason for this.
Comments at a previous F-Secure post included this observation:
The privacy laws are pretty strict in Canada, so it takes a lot of effort and court orders to ascertain the identity of someone based on their IP address (at least, if you're playing by the rules).
It's a quick hop across the border from the US, and you don't need a passport (if you drive), at least not until next year sometime.
So, if you're an American into money laundering, you set up a few bank accounts in Canada, and once a week or so you drive up, go to an internet cafe to make arrangements, drive around to a few banks to collect cash, drive to a few different Western Unions to forward the money, then drive back across the border with a few grand for your trouble.
Washington Post blogger Brian Krebs, who posts at Security Fix, also commented on the topic. He previously wrote about these scams, even getting in contact with one of the people behind it while posing as a potential mule.
"If you believe you can pull one over on these cyber criminal operations, you are probably too clever by half: Almost all money mules wind up being taken one way or other," said Krebs.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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