Hackers Find a Way to Steal Some $9M from Writers of Paper Checks
For those who think using old-fashioned checks is the way to avoid Internet scamsters, an enterprising group of criminals has found a high-tech way to steal from them, too.
An unknown band of thieves believed to be based in Russia hacked into several websites for businesses that store check images online. The accurate information they obtained—including names, account numbers and signature images—combined with easy-to-acquire software and printers enabled them to submit for payment checks seemed legitimate, the Associated Press reports. Not only do the banks have little reason to suspect the checks, the vicitms themselves do not know their accounts were ever compromised. So the odds of the bad checks going through are high, and the scam continues to add new victims to the $9 million or so in fake checks already written.
“Check counterfeiting is kind of old school, but these guys have figured out how to make it highly automated,” says Joe Stewart of SecureWorks, which exposed the scam. “They can get all this data and use that to write counterfeit checks all day long.”
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