cyber criminalswho carry out ‘advance free fraud’ familiar to many victims of their fake emails.
A new report by expert Jonathan Lusthaus, ‘Cybercrime in South East Asia’, published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute shows many are based in Malaysia.
The report highlights how the online threat from scammers out of Nigeria has evolved in recent years to ‘business email compromise’. This involves a scammer impersonating a CEO or other person to instruct an employee in the victim company to transfer funds into an account controlled by the criminals.
Vietnam, for example, hosts a local community of ‘black hat’ hackers involved in international credit card fraud.
They target e-commerce sites and steal their databases of credit card details. The cybercriminals then sell the card data in virtual marketplaces or buy products online themselves and ship them back to Vietnam.
Dr Lusthaus says the research shows cybercrime is far from an anonymous activity.
