The account of 1000 people was empty with the SMS of equity shares!
According to the report of Economy Online, citing Hamshahri, professional fraudsters have emptied the accounts of more than a thousand people by sending infected SMS.
The members of the fraud gang hacked the accounts of more than a thousand people and pocketed billions of Tomans by sending SMS messages “view equity shares”.
The investigation of the Fata police of Alborz province to identify and arrest this gang began with the complaint of a large number of people who lost their property, who claimed that their bank accounts had been tampered with. Examining the statements of these people showed that all of their bank accounts were emptied online and all those who lost money were victims of phishing fraudsters. The research showed that all these people were caught by fraudsters after receiving an infected text message. The SMS was sent to those who lost their property with the title “view equity shares” or “receive equity dividends”.
This text message also contained a link so that when the victims clicked on the link, a malware was installed on their phone, which provided their phone information to the fraudsters. The infected link asked for other details from the lost property. including the card number and its information. On the other hand, the malware that was installed on the phone of the losers worked in such a way that every text message sent to their phone was sent to the fraudsters at the same time. In this way, the fraudsters, who had the victim’s bank card information and on the other hand, could access the text message containing their second password, easily made online purchases and thus emptied the victim’s account.
The police, who were sure that all these frauds were committed by the members of a gang, continued the investigation to identify them. Investigations showed that in order not to leave a trace of themselves, the fraudsters had prepared different debit cards in order to transfer the defrauded money to the accounts of these cards and spend them. The cards that these people had were rental cards or debit cards bought from addicts so that the police could not trace them to the main members of the gang. However, the research team was able to find the first clues about the gang members during the investigation and tracking of the money that was taken out of the accounts of the losers.
Research showed that the members of this gang, like many other phishing gangs, met each other through Telegram groups without knowing each other. They lived in different provinces and were in contact with each other through Telegram, and every time they hacked an account, they shared its information in this group. Later, it was revealed that this gang consists of 4 experienced criminals, all of whom had been arrested and imprisoned for phishing fraud before. Later, the residences of all four gang members were identified and they were arrested in simultaneous and separate operations. According to Sardar Hamid Hadavand, the police chief of Alborz province, after arresting this gang, a large amount of jewelry and coins bought with fraudulent money were discovered from their hiding place and it was found that they hacked the accounts of 1,888 people and more than 4.5 billion tomans. They had stolen from these accounts.
According to this report, with the confessions of the members of this gang, a legal order was issued for all of them, and the accused were brought before the judicial authorities.