The #1 crime which results in the biggest financial loss is BEC fraud. The #2 crime is pig butchering. Ronnie Tokazowski https://twitter.com/iHeartMalware walks us through this wild world.SponsorsSupport for this episode comes from NetSuite. NetSuite gives you visibility and control of your financials, planning, budgeting, and of course - inventory - so you can manage risk, get reliable forecasts, and improve margins. NetSuite helps you identify rising costs, automate your manual business processes, and see where to save money. KNOW your numbers. KNOW your business. And get to KNOW how NetSuite can be the source of truth for your entire company. Visit www.netsuite.com/darknet to learn more.Support for this show comes from Drata. Drata streamlines your SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR & many other compliance frameworks, and provides 24-hour continuous control monitoring so you focus on scaling securely. Listeners of Darknet Diaries can get 10% off Drata and waived implementation fees at drata.com/darknetdiaries.This show is sponsored by Shopify. Shopify is the best place to go to start or grow your online retail business. And running a growing business means getting the insights you need wherever you are. With Shopify’s single dashboard, you can manage orders, shipping, and payments from anywhere. Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/darknet.
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A few years back, a listener wrote to me to tell me about a problem they're facing. Okay, check this out. They went to buy a house, right? And when you go to buy a house, there's like a little dance that everyone does. Like, do you give them the money first? Or do they give you the deed first and the keys? Or do you do like a quick swap at the same time?
What if it's a phony check or the deed is made up? This is where escrow comes in. Both the seller and buyer hand their things to a third party, someone that both sides trust and waits for everything to clear. If the check clears and the deed is valid, then escrow says, okay, the deal is done and gives the money to the seller and the keys to the buyer.
So this guy, a listener of mine, says he bought a house and during this process, he gave $250,000 to the escrow company. But then someone scammed the escrow company. They posed as the seller and said, hey, could you just deposit the money into our bank account directly? And escrow's like, oh yeah, of course, no problem. We do this all the time. Here you go.
And they deposited the $250,000 into the scammer's account instead of the actual seller. But here's the crazy part. Because the seller never got the money, escrow wouldn't give the keys to the buyer. They were being jerks about it. They were trying to say, oh, sorry, we lost the money. No house for you. The deal has been canceled. And the buyer's like, whoa, no, no, no. That's what escrow is for.
You're our trusted third party. We trusted you to do this deal. You screwed up and that's not our problem. That's yours. But escrow's like, hmm, I never got an update on what happened here and if this got resolved. I think the buyer took escrow to court to try to get their money back.
What a nightmare, though, to send a huge check somewhere only for it to go to the wrong place and then someone else runs off with the money. Ah!
These are true stories from the dark side of the Internet. I'm Jack Recider. This is Darknet Diaries.
This episode is brought to you by SpyCloud. For some people, ignorance is bliss. But for you, as a security practitioner, that's not the case. I went to spycloud.com to check into my darknet exposure, and I won't tell you what it is, but spoiler alert, I found some things that are pretty eye-opening.
From breach exposures to info stealing malware infections, knowing what criminals know about you and your business is the first step to setting things right. Resetting stolen passwords and addressing the enterprise access points that have been stolen by malware helps you protect your business from ransomware, account takeovers, and online fraud.
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