Investment Scam | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) this week announced the seizure of $61 million worth of Tether that were allegedly associated with bogus cryptocurrency schemes known as pig butchering . The confiscated funds were traced to cryptocurrency addresses used for the laundering of criminally derived proceeds stolen from victims of cryptocurrency investment scams, the department added. "Criminal actors and professional money launderers use cyber-enabled fraud schemes to swindle their victims and conceal their ill-gotten gains," said HSI Charlotte Acting Special Agent in Charge Kyle D. Burns. "HSI special agents work diligently to trace the illicit proceeds of crime across the globe to disrupt and dismantle the transnational criminal organizations that seek to defraud hardworking Americans." As is the norm in such cybercrime operations, threat actors are known to target individuals by cultivating romantic relationships after approaching them on dating and social m...

Google has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. against two app developers for allegedly engaging in an "international online consumer investment fraud scheme" that tricked users into downloading bogus Android apps from the Google Play Store and other sources and stealing their funds under the guise of promising higher returns. The individuals in question are Yunfeng Sun (aka Alphonse Sun) and Hongnam Cheung (aka Zhang Hongnim or Stanford Fischer), who are believed to be based in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, respectively. The defendants are said to have uploaded about 87 crypto apps to the Play Store to pull off the social engineering scam since at least 2019, with over 100,000 users downloading them and leading to substantial financial losses. "The gains conveyed by the apps were illusory," the tech giant said in its complaint. "And the scheme did not end there." "Instead, when individual victims attempted to withdraw their balances, defendants and their co...