Re:An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hitting Bri...
by robinson-wall on Thursday October 14, 2021 @08:34AM
(#28863401)
You see ads on instagram offering to buy or borrow your bank account for £50... and when they're used for muling guess who it is that gets their account banned and then a CIFAS marker ensuring they can't bank anywhere else? The desperate kid who needed the money, not the actual criminals behind it.
Re:An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hitting Bri...
by Nextgrid on Thursday October 14, 2021 @09:14AM
(#28863810)
Yet another reason for regulating advertising. Why are these platforms not held liable as accomplices? I can't think of any legitimate reason for an ad to buy/rent someone's bank account.
Re:An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hitting Bri...
by jdavis703 on Thursday October 14, 2021 @10:43AM
(#28864953)
At least in my experience these aren’t official ads. It’s random sketchy people posting about “business opportunities” with stacks of cash or whatever.
Re:An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hitting Bri...
by q1w2 on Thursday October 14, 2021 @10:16AM
(#28864538)
Acting as a mule for money laundering is a crime. They are criminals. They might be young, but the majority of them know they are doing something wrong.
Re:An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hitting Bri...
by robinson-wall on Thursday October 14, 2021 @10:53AM
(#28865076)
I'm not suggesting they aren't criminals. But there is a spectrum of criminality and I am suggesting they are considerably less so than the leaders of the fraud ring.
These ads are deliberately designed to prey on the desperate, unfortunate or the technically illiterate.
Some of them probably know exactly what they're doing and I have no sympathy, but some of them probably fall into the same category as people falling for Authorised Push Payment fraud.
Re:An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hitting Bri...
by MichaelZuo on Thursday October 14, 2021 @01:35PM
(#28867368)
Isn’t that true for all types of crime?
In the worst cases the accepted practice can be as severe as locking them up and throw the key away, even if it was totally unintentional.
Like a drunk driver plowing into a group of school children, or a ship captain that sinks a cruise ship while distracted.
Having extra scrutiny imposed on future banking activity is a minor punishment for a minor crime.
Most people don't realise what these accounts are used for, or just don't care because they're paid enough to look the other way. Then stolen funds are quickly moved across dozens of banks, with the money being split and re-combined with potentially legitimate money. Eventually the administrative overhead of tracking the money gets so great that no one bank can be bothered to do anything about, and the police aren't interested in actually investigating. The end result is that once the stolen money if a dozen or so bank accounts away from the victim, it's extremely unlikely that anyone is actually going to trace the money to that account, effectively making the money clean.