The US Federal Bureau of Investigation is planning a major prosecution to bust up the operations that cyber criminals use to turn funds stolen online into readily available cash, a top bureau official said Tuesday.
The FBI is targeting the end of the criminal supply chain—the “money mules” who receive transfers of stolen funds in their banks accounts—to raise public awareness and dissuade people from becoming mules, said Patrick Carney, acting chief of the FBI’s Cyber Criminal Section.
Money mules are people who think they have a legitimate work-at-home job, where they receive goods or get money wired into their bank accounts, and their job is to forward the goods or a portion of the funds, to another person. These scams are usually presented as a work-from-home shipping clerk job, or perhaps a business consultant or an accounting administrator.
These jobs are posted on job boards like Monster.com and HotJobs.com They are sent out by spam. They are advertised online and even in newspapers.
But the reality is that these are scams, and are operated by the cyber underground as a way to launder stolen funds or goods purchased online with stolen credit cards.
We do not know how many people are working as “mules”, but it must be ten thousand or more in the USA. The anti-money-laundering website BobBear.co.uk lists hundreds of active fake companies that are fronts for money mules.
