Package Deals to Commit eBay Fraud

Gone are the days where committing fraud took knowledge, or technical expertise. Personal, financial and "how to scam" kits are all easily purchased in IRC (Internet Relay Chat) chatrooms.

AuctionBytes (Ina Steiner) is reporting:

"According to an "eBay scam kit" obtained by AuctionBytes, women are easy marks on eBay. The kit, marketed as "eBay: Women Dough v1.8," contained everything a scammer needs to set up auctions on eBay to sell items they don't own and don't intend to fulfill to "customers."

"The eBay Women Dough scam kit contained three prepackaged high-end auctions targeting U.S. female buyers. The kit included descriptions and photos to include in the eBay auctions with detailed advice on how to list, handle customer service and accept payments."

These kits even contain detailed instructions on how to bypass eBay controls and dupe the potential victim into using unprotected wire transfer services, such as Western Union and MoneyGram.

Full story, here.

Please note that AuctionByte's article also quoted a Washington Post Article on IRC chatrooms written by Brian Krebbs. This article covers the full spectrum of information that is bought and sold in these chatrooms and paints a pretty realistic picture of the activity.

Here is something, I thought was interesting from the article:

"Marcus Sachs, a former cyber-security adviser to the White House who now directs the Bethesda, Md.-based SANS Internet Storm Center, said that if the information posted by the IRC channel operators is legitimate, then they are likely working with people on the inside at the major credit card issuers. But Sachs said he suspects that by "verifying" credit card information posted by other chat room members, those running the IRC channels are more interested in scamming the phishers."

Full story, here.

I guess we now know where all the stolen information from the record amount of data breaches is going. It's being sold on the Internet.

Here is a previous post, I wrote on that subject (data breaches):

Information Breaches, the Human Factor