Cyber Crime
Interpol Makes Over 1,000 Arrests In Massive Online Fraud Crackdown
Interpol has arrested around 1,003 people in a special mission that took place in 20 countries. Over the course of four months, the HAEICHI-II operation intercepted almost 27 million dollars from going into fraudulent bank accounts and froze over 2,350 of them. They claimed that cybercrime is changing in new ways every day as a result of the natural world around them.
Interpol has targeted more cybercriminals in its follow-up operation after the success of HAEICHI-I earlier this year, which resulted in over 500 arrests and the seizure of $83 million. The synchronised effort, dubbed HAEICHI-II, lasted four months, from June to September this year.
Angola, Brunei, Cambodia, Colombia, China, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, South Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Philippines, Romania, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Thailand, and Vietnam were among the countries involved in the operation.
Interpol has now intercepted almost $27 million in this case. Among his notable accomplishments is the rescue of a Colombian textiles company from bankruptcy. The textile company was duped by a Business Email Compromise attack, in which the threat actor pretended to be a legal representative of the company and demanded $16 million in payment.
This was supposed to be wired to a faraway Chinese bank account in two equal instalments. Interpol recovered around 94 percent of the stolen funds in this instance after learning about the effort. Another case involves a Slovenian company being duped into sending $800,000 to Chinese mule accounts.
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Finally, Interpol reported that attackers are also using the famous Netflix show Squid Game in their efforts. They discovered trojan-infected apps with the Squid Game theme that were billing customers for premium services.
“Online scams like those leveraging malicious apps evolve as quickly as the cultural trends they opportunistically exploit,” said José De Gracia, Assistant Director, Criminal Networks at INTERPOL. “Sharing information on emerging threats is vital to the ability of police to protect the victims of online financial crime. It also lets police know that no country is alone in this fight. Operation HAECHI-II shows that we can successfully strike back against this threat when we act together.”
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