Twelve suspects have been arrested by Britain’s National Hi-Tech Crime Unit on charges tied to phishing scams, a week after British police arrested an Estonian man suspected of running one.
The 12 new suspects, all from former Soviet republics Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine, were charged specifically on suspicion of laundering money stolen from phishing victims.
The NHTCU believes the 12 were recruited by Russian organized crime groups to open British bank accounts into which the phished monies were moved before being moved again to Russian accounts, for which the 12 were believed to get 7 percent of the proceeds.
The Estonian suspect arrested a week earlier was accused of luring people through e-mails touting job offers to websites from which they were infected with a Trojan horse that stole user names and passwords from the unsuspecting job seekers.
Brightmail, a San Francisco e-mail filtering company, said phishing attacks have grown tenfold over the past nine months, with the company itself reporting that it caught 3.1 billion fraudulent e-mails in that time frame, compared to 300 million last August.
In return, the intermediaries took a 7 percent piece of the action.
Market researchers Gartner issued a study last week saying almost 2 million Americans may have handed phishers sensitive personal financial information, while about 57 million Americans feared they might have been phished, and 11 million clicked on links in phishing e-mails. Gartner drew the conclusions based on pollings of 5,000 American Netizens.
