14 DAY TRIAL // Iulian Schiopu, of Craiova, Romania, was sentenced to serve 45 months in a federal prison for his involvement in a phishing scheme perpetrated against customers of multiple American banks in June 2005.
He was part of a group of 19 Romanian nationals that targeted financial institutions and companies, such as Citibank, Capital One, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Comerica Bank, Regions Bank, LaSalle Bank, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo & Co., eBay and PayPal, through phishing campaigns.
The court documents show that a resident of Madison, Connecticut, received a suspicious email with a link that led to a phishing page for People’s Bank.
A classic lure was used: the message informed that access to the online bank account had been blocked and it would be unlocked as soon as some information was entered. This, of course, consisted of all the details necessary to log into the account and to withdraw the money.
“The web page appeared to originate from People’s Bank, but, as the investigation revealed, was actually hosted on a compromised computer in Minnesota,” says the news release from the FBI.
All the information would then be sent to an email account under the control of the cybercriminals, who would use it to cash the money from ATMs, some of them in Romania.
The investigation revealed thousands of emails with data collected from the victims: credit or debit card numbers, expiration dates, CVV codes, PIN numbers. Additional personal identification information such as names, addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers, was also found.
Schiopu, aged 34, was arrested in Sweden on May 7 and extradited to the United States on September 12, 2013.
Deirdre M. Daly, United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut, acknowledged the critical assistance provided by the U.S. Department of Justice Office of International Affairs, the FBI Legal Attaché in Bucharest, Interpol, the Romanian National Police and the United States Marshals Service.
Phishing schemes are one of the most popular methods for deceiving computer users not just to access a web page that pretends to belong to the victim’s bank, but also for distributing malware that can lead to financial fraud.
Well-organized cybercriminals launch these campaigns in waves and use multiple forms of incentives. The general recommendation is to refrain from accessing links that have a dodgy origin.
Moreover, things that seem too good to be true are most of the times an attempt to trick the user into getting their machine infected.