A sophisticated new scam targeting high-end computer hardware has emerged on Amazon, specifically focusing on expensive DDR5 memory kits. According to a report by VideoCardz, fraudsters are deceiving buyers by placing ancient DDR2 modules inside counterfeit packaging designed to look like brand-new, high-performance retail kits.

The issue came to light when a consumer identified as BravoNorris purchased four ADATA XPG Caster DDR5-6000 32GB kits from Amazon Spain. While the exterior packaging arrived in factory-sealed plastic wrap and appeared entirely legitimate, the contents inside the third kit were a different story. Upon opening the box, the buyer discovered old DDR or DDR2 memory sticks that had been glued to metal blocks to mimic the weight of modern modules. These fake units were finished with low-quality counterfeit stickers to further the deception.

This seems to be a classic case of return fraud executed with high precision. In this scenario, a scammer purchases a genuine high-end RAM kit and carefully swaps the expensive DDR5 modules with worthless old hardware and weights. The package is then professionally resealed to look factory-new and returned to Amazon. Because the packaging appears untouched, the automated logistics systems often restock the item as new inventory without a technical inspection of the internal components.

ADATA has responded to the incident by advising customers to buy memory products only from authorized retail partners instead of unknown third-party marketplace sellers. The company also pointed to its online verification portal and said it will step up consumer education around genuine packaging and security features to help curb counterfeit products.

The rise in hardware fraud is closely linked to the current economic climate in the tech industry. As AI-related demand consumes the global supply of DRAM and NAND flash memory, prices for DDR5 and SSDs have climbed significantly. This scarcity has made high-end memory a lucrative target for organized scammers, and the industry is now bracing for ripple effects that could impact the pricing and security of motherboards, GPUs, and upcoming gaming consoles.

To safeguard against these sophisticated scams, it is recommended to record a continuous, uncut video of the unboxing process. This footage serves as essential evidence if a refund dispute arises. Additionally, buyers should physically inspect the module notch, as DDR5 has a specific alignment that differs from older generations, and use manufacturer websites to verify that the serial numbers on the modules match the retail box.

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An Indian businessman based in Nagpur was recently scammed by a person that posed as a bookie to steal his life’s fortune. The scammer was identified as Anant that was using the alias of Sontu Navratan Jain.

Scammer faked an online gambling platform to steal Rs 58 crore

The businessman was approached by Jain who persuaded him to try out online gaming. He claimed that this new avenue might bring solid profits. While he was initially hesitant, the businessman eventually agreed to try it out over the claims of easy money. He first transferred 8 lakhs INR to the scammer’s account through a hawala merchant.

After this, a WhatsApp link was sent to the victim that took him to an online gambling account, which showed 8 lakh INR in balance. The businessman was winning initially but eventually started losing his fortune. Over time, he won 5 crore INR but lost a whopping 58 crore INR. He found this situation suspicious and urged Jain to refund his entire losses, who denied to do so. Thus, the man from Nagpur turned to the cyber police, registering the case under the Indian Penal Code.

The police found Jain’s residence and raided it, but the scammer managed to escape ahead of time. He is believed to have left for Dubai at the moment. Although, his residence was found with over 14 crore INR in cash along with 4 kilograms of gold and more than 200 kilograms of silver.

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Google’s Gmail introduced a new feature that used Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) technology to verify the identity of email senders. When an email was received from a verified sender, a blue checkmark appears next to the company’s name in the inbox. Google initially introduced BIMI in Gmail in 2020, allowing enrolled brands to include authenticated logos in their emails. The blue checkmark is supposed to be a more noticeable indicator that the sender is legitimate, providing users with an extra layer of protection against email scams. It seems that it might’ve backfired on Google to some degree, as scammers seem to have already found a way around this.

Google ignored the first bug report made, but then social media did its thing

Chris Plummer, a diligent cybersecurity engineer, uncovered a concerning trend: scammers finding a way to deceive Gmail’s authentication systems, enabling them to appear as legitimate sources and bypass security checks. Despite Plummer’s sincere efforts to bring this to Google’s attention, his bug report was shockingly dismissed as “intended behavior.” Obviously surprised by the response, Plummer took to social media (specifically Twitter) to voice his frustrations, sparking a significant and m outcry from concerned users.

Plummer’s revelations on Twitter resonated with users and experts alike, highlighting the severity of the issue and the need for action. The collective opposition seems to have caught Google’s attention, prompting the company to reconsider its initial reaction to the same. Realizing the potential consequences of scammers exploiting the system, Google is now compelled to address the vulnerability and fix it swiftly. Social media can be a really useful tool at times, it seems.

While it is kind of annoying that Plummer had to resort to public pressure to elicit a response from Google, it is essential to acknowledge the company’s subsequent acknowledgement of the issue (even though it might be for the sake of the company’s image). Users must remain optimistic that Google will try to identify and resolve the problem.

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(Via)

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Apple, one of the world’s most valuable and innovative companies, has been defrauded out of over $17 million by one of its own employees. Dhirendra Prasad, a former buyer in Apple’s Global Service Supply Chain department, has been sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to repay his ill-gotten gains to the tech giant.

Prasad Used His Knowledge of Apple’s Fraud Detection Practices to Evade Arrest

According to the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, Prasad conspired with two vendors to conduct fraud against Apple by “taking kickbacks, stealing parts, inflating invoices and causing Apple to pay for items and services it never received.” Prasad used his knowledge of Apple’s fraud detection practices to avoid getting caught for years.

While Prasad was able to evade detection for a while, his schemes were eventually uncovered. He pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and conspiracy to defraud the United States in November of last year. Two charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering were dismissed during his sentencing.

Prasad’s sentence of three years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, sends a clear message that defrauding companies, especially ones as prominent as Apple, will not be tolerated. The US government has already seized $5.5 million worth of assets from Prasad, and he has been ordered to pay an additional forfeiture money judgment of $8.1 million, on top of the $17.4 million he defrauded from Apple. He also must pay $1.9 million to the Internal Revenue Service for not paying taxes on the proceeds of his schemes.

The case of Dhirendra Prasad serves as a cautionary tale for other employees who may consider engaging in fraudulent behavior. Companies like Apple rely on the honesty and integrity of their employees, and any violation of that trust is taken very seriously. It is important for individuals to remember that the consequences of fraudulent behavior can be severe, and they will eventually be held accountable for their actions.

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(Via)

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Scammers posing as Google employees have once again hit the internet, targeting unsuspecting users with a Gmail scam. The bait? A fake email notification, informing users they have won a prize for being the 18.25 billionth searcher on the search engine giant’s platform. The email subject line reads “Online Reward Program,” and entices users to click on a link to claim their prize.

The Link Redirects Users to a Fake Phishing Website

It’s easy to see how people can fall for the scam. After all, who doesn’t want to win a prize? But, it’s important to note that Google does not reward users for using its search engine. The link included in the email takes users to a fake phishing website that tricks them into giving out their personal data and credentials, leaving them vulnerable to identity theft and financial fraud.

This scam is not new and has been circulating for some time now. The fact that it’s still prevalent shows that cybercriminals are still able to deceive people. In a world where so much personal information is readily available online, it’s more important than ever to be vigilant about the messages we receive and the links we click on.

The scam has prompted Google to issue a warning to its users, urging them to be cautious when browsing the web and to flag anything suspicious. This is not the first time Google has had to issue such a warning, and it likely won’t be the last.

The best way to avoid falling victim to scams like this is to be skeptical of any message or email that claims you have won a prize or asks for your personal information. Always verify the authenticity of the email and the sender before clicking on any links or entering any data. Remember, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Stay alert and stay safe.

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(Via)

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A man from Delhi lost Rs. 29 lakhs after falling victim to an Instagram scam in a horrifying event. The man had purchased an iPhone from an Instagram seller. The seller gave a significant discount on the iPhones, causing the consumer to make the deal. The complainant, identified as Vikas Katiyar by officials, resides in Delhi’s Ghitorni neighbourhood.

The complainant told the police that a few days before, he went to an Instagram page where he saw iPhones being sold at high discounts and was attracted to buy one. According to Katiyar, this gang of people requested 30% of the phone’s purchase in advance, or Rs. 28,000. Following that, their staff contacted him via several mobile phones and requested further payments to clear customs holdings and other taxes.

Nevertheless, the customer did not get any shipment details after making the purchase. When he contacted the seller, the seller stated that the shipment was held up in customs and requested additional funds to clear it. The buyer deposited more money into the seller’s account after believing the seller’s story. This went on for a few weeks until the customer realised he had been duped.

According to the victim’s complaint, he transferred INR 28,69,850 ($35,000) across many accounts, expecting that everything would be addressed and that he would receive the aforesaid iPhone. The buyer filed a report with the Delhi Police’s cybercrime unit, which is looking into the situation. The police have warned people to be cautious while making online transactions and to confirm the seller’s legitimacy before making any payments.

This instance emphasises the significance of exercising caution while making online transactions, particularly from unknown sellers on social networking sites. Before making any payments, it is critical to verify the seller’s validity and to look for reviews and ratings.

Scammers have used advanced ways to trick unwary victims in recent years, making online frauds more widespread. To prevent falling victim to such scams, it is critical to be conscious of the many forms of online fraud and to take the required safeguards when doing online transactions. That concludes this post. Thank you for sticking with me all the way to the end. Please share your thoughts on this by leaving a comment in your own words down below.

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A shocking scam involving fake websites that impersonate real businesses and charge customers with fake Amex merchant accounts has been exposed by Cory Doctorow, a writer and activist who writes about technology and society.

Doctorow shared his story on Twitter, where he told how he was scammed when he tried to buy some takeout food from a website called kiinthaila.com. He found out that the website was actually a fake one created by scammers using Wix, a platform that allows anyone to create websites effortlessly. The scammers also created fraudulent Amex merchant accounts for real businesses and used them to charge customers who ordered from their fake websites.

Doctorow contacted Amex to report the fraud, but he was disappointed by their response. He said they did not seem interested in investigating the scam or shutting down the fraudulent accounts. He also pointed out that Google was promoting these scammers by showing their ads as the first search result instead of the official website, which is kiinthaiburbank.com.

This scam is not only harmful to customers who lose their money and trust, but also to legitimate businesses whose names and reputations are damaged by these scammers. It is alarming that Google even allows these scammers to manipulate its search results and put its users at risk.

The tweet has then since garnered over 66.9 thousand likes on Twitter as of publishing, increasing the pressure on Google to put measures in place to prevent the scams from occurring.

In other news, Microsoft is aiming for Google’s search engine market share. This month, the tech giant Microsoft announced that it is bringing OpenAI’s latest GPT-4 technology to the company’s search engine, Bing. To read more on the new Bing, you can follow our coverage here.

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(Source)

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The dark world of “pig butchering” investment scams has found a new frontier – the official app stores of Google and Apple. These high-yielding scams have been using fake websites, advertisements, and social engineering schemes to trick victims into downloading fraudulent apps and investing large amounts of money into fake assets.

Cybersecurity firm Sophos has uncovered a campaign by China-based threat group “ShaZhuPan,” which appears to be highly organized with various teams handling victim interaction, finance, franchise, and money laundering. The group is said to be targeting male users over Facebook and Tinder using fake profiles of women, laden with images of a lavish lifestyle, to win over the victims’ trust.

The malicious apps, which are named “Ace Pro” and “MBM_BitScan” on the Apple App Store and “BitScan” on the Google Play Store, initially allow victims to withdraw small amounts of cryptocurrency, building trust in the scheme. But once larger amounts are in the equation, the accounts are locked, and the victims are left with nothing.

The method used by the ShaZhuPan gang to bypass the app store security checks is as follows – they submit an app signed with a valid certificate issued by Apple or Google, which is the most important requirement for getting into the app stores. Once the app is approved, the developer changes the domain to a malicious server, and the victim is presented with a fake cryptocurrency trading interface.

The BitScan apps for Android and iOS have different vendor names but communicate with the same command and control server, which appears to impersonate a legitimate cryptocurrency exchange company in Japan. Since these apps are only downloaded by a small number of targeted users, they are not widely reported, making it difficult for app store security reviewers to identify and remove them.

Sophos highlights that the rise of “FinTech” has normalized people’s trust in software tools, and when the apps are sourced from official Apple and Google stores, the sense of legitimacy is even higher. The best way to protect yourself is to research the app before downloading, check reviews from other users, read the privacy policy, and verify the developer/publisher details and the company information.

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(Via)

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When you visit a website, there is a chance that you are greeted with an advertisement (or multiple ads). What’s actually happening is that a number of advertising companies are competing for that particular ad slot on the website. All of this happens instantaneously, so the advertisement you see is a result of a contest that happens right there and then. What if there are multiple winners for that particular contest, and all of them are getting paid for it? 

The Ad Scam, now known as Vastflux, was revealed by security researchers on January 19, 2023. Marion Habiby, a data scientist (and also the lead researcher on the case), states that this is the biggest and the most complex attack ever seen. The organization behind these attacks ran the scam for a considerable amount of time and made copious amounts of money while doing so. Billions of advertisements are displayed across websites and applications every single day, which is how ad networks make money – by getting people to click on them. This generates hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue per year.

The fraud involved multiple steps, as per reports. The fraudulent organization, upon winning the auction for an advertisement slot, used to maliciously stack multiple video advertisements on top of each other. They weren’t trying to hack or hijack a device or network, they were simply inserting JavaScript code into that ad to take control of that particular slot. By the time the ad disappears, the attack is terminated – leaving practically no trace. 

Habiby further states that at the peak of the attacks, 12 billion requests were made per day. 11 million devices were affected by the attack. Whereas iOS devices were the ones primarily affected, Android phones were also a victim of the attack. Unfortunately, users couldn’t possibly notice if their device was being affected. But there was an after-effect of the attack – the stacked advertisements were causing phone batteries to drain significantly faster.

In light of ongoing investigations, the name of the organization behind these attacks hasn’t been revealed. Vastflux has undoubtedly created ripples in the world of cybersecurity. 

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With the Flipkart Big Billion Days sale kicking off a couple of days ago, buyers across India were offered great deals on a number of products. This was especially true for electronic devices. But while some deals were pretty decent, some deals were maybe too good to be true as a buyer almost got scammed for a laptop purchase.

The news arrives from a popular post in LinkedIn. An IIM Ahmedabad student from Delhi, India had ordered a laptop from Flipkart during the Big Billion Days sales. However, rather than getting a notebook PC, the buyer only got detergent soap bars in the box. Furthermore, the buyer, Yashaswi Sharma, also claimed that the Flipkart Customer support also denied them the refund, despite opting for the ‘open box’ delivery option.

Although, in a comment later on, it was confirmed that Flipkart had began the refund process. The open box system is basically eligible for certain products on the e-commerce platform. Through this, buyers can unbox the new package in front of the delivery agent and can accept the delivery if they are satisfied with the item. Sharma stated that the issue occurred since his father collected the package, being unaware of the open box process.

But fortunately, the buyer had a CCTV video that showed that even the delivery agent was not aware of the open box delivery system. However, the company stated that “No return possible. This is our final stance. This matter cannot be escalated further.” But Yashaswi stated that “A relative filed a complaint at the local police station with relevant proofs. The Flipkart team contacted me to inform that a refund has been processed, although I haven’t received it yet.”

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UPDATE:

As of recent, Xiaomi announced an anti-fraud feature in its MIUI 13. However, one Xiaomi Exec has come to the Xiaomi China Community Forum to deny that MIUI has added any Chinese National Online Anti-Fraud Agency feature/app in its latest MIUI 13.  Despite this, the South China Morning Post has reported that many Chinese Xiaomi users are unable to install certain apps after upgrading to Xiaomi’s latest MIUI 13 and users were attributing the problem to the “system-level full-link anti-telecoms fraud”, which was announced earlier, by Xiaomi’s head of MIUI, Jin Fan, during the company’s product event on December 28. Then, one Xiaomi spokesman clarified that the company’s anti-fraud feature is designed to flag spam calls, which was not supposed to flag apps as well.

Ever since the existence of wireless communication, there always has been a person behind the screen or phone trying to scam you of your info or of your money. With the prevalence of online scams these days, it is getting quite annoying to try to avoid them from getting into your life at every corner.

Well, fear not! Xiaomi has recently a new feature in its latest MIUI 13 to help solve these issues for its users. In MIUI 13, Xiaomi, in collaboration with the Chinese online anti-fraud government agency, has developed an in-country fully linked automated network with the database of info scammers and fraudsters across the country.

Xiaomi mentions this feature implementation will be system-wide on MIUI 13 supported devices. This feature will be using a blacklist from the national fraud database, and in turn, show up as a warning to MIUI 13 users, if the SMS message or phone number used is listed in the database, or seems identical (i.e. word for word) to a message listed in the blacklist. 

An example of how this feature works is when you are receiving a call from a blacklisted number in the database, the number will be shown as “caller fraudster” on screen for the user to immediately discern the difference. The warning will also appear next to the contact name as a warning, to let those who were recently upgraded to MIUI 13 be aware that which one of their contacts may be a potential info scammer. 

As for SMSes, the network will also help identify the fraudulent messages, which may include fake OTPs from “banks”, or “banks” warning to pay up the credit card you have(when you don’t even have one). In MIUI 13, two warnings will be given. First, if the SMS service number is a known blacklisted number in the database and second, the message content resembles the vocabulary of a fraudulent SMS.

As mentioned by the MIUI software team, this is the Chinese government’s first initiative to implement this feature in the country’s smartphones, and as the country’s leading tech giant, they want to take action for the sake of their users as well.

As of now, only MIUI 13 supported devices are the Xiaomi 12 series, however, expect Xiaomi to roll out MIUI 13 to more of its devices in the coming months.

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(Via)

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Twitter has just witnessed one of the biggest attacks on its platform in recent times which affected big names like Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Kanye West among others. These hacked accounts were also used for a major scamming operation that used verified accounts of known celebrities to steal other Twitter users’ money.

We are aware of a security incident impacting accounts on Twitter. We are investigating and taking steps to fix it. We will update everyone shortly.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 15, 2020

At the moment, it is still uncertain how the massive hack was achieved. Although, it might be possible that a new vulnerability has been discovered within Twitter’s own systems and has been exploited. The hack affected known individuals like Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Elon Musk, and even Apple as well. In a desperate move, Twitter has blocked all new tweets from every verified user, regardless of the account being compromised or not.

Editor’s Pick: Samsung Galaxy Note20 Ultra may feature dynamic refresh rate switching between 60Hz and 120Hz

Twitter Support’s official Tweet read, “We have locked accounts that were compromised and will restore access to the original account owner only when we are certain we can do so securely.” Notably, the company’s investigation into the matter had also revealed that its own internal employee tools were compromised and were used in the hack. This may be how the scammers circumvented the two factor authentication method.

The hack first began with Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Twitter accounted tweeted out a bitcoin scam, where the money is promised to be doubled if sent to a certain account. Other verified figures like Bill Gates soon joined in with a similar tweet. Although, each of these scam tweets were deleted just as quickly as they were being sent out. We will provide more updates as the situation develops further, so stay tuned.

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