FrankOnFraud

The FTC issued a warning this week, and it’s something I have been chasing down for over a year. Scammers are spoofing Car, Tractor, RV, and Heavy Equipment dealerships to steal millions in wire transfers from victims. I have been tracing this scheme for 18 months and have cataloged more than 1,300 of these spoofed …

Over the last year, I have seen a fraud trend mushroom – its called ghost students. Ghost student fraud is one of the fastest-growing forms of fraud affecting American colleges. Criminals use stolen or synthetic identities to enroll in open admission schools, mostly community colleges, collect Pell Grants, and vanish without showing up for school. …

Cesar was 25 years old and out of work when he walked into a Miami CarMax in August 2020 and filled out an application for a $49,000 Mercedes. He had no steady job and no real income, but that didn’t matter because the car was never meant for him. Within a day, he handed the …

On February 29th, 2024, a consumer from Texas posted a complaint on the CFPB portal against Experian that read like the start of a novel “In the quiet humdrum of everyday life, a sudden jolt shattered the tranquility. I had become a victim of identity theft. Like a thief in the night, unseen hands had …

An Arizona woman lost $4.3 million in an elaborate digital arrest scheme where criminals posed as FBI Agents and NYPD officers. The woman was held hostage in her home for two months as agents told her she was under digital surveillance and they were watching her every move. The Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office says deputies …

Employees at some of the largest hedge funds are picking up the phone and think they are talking to their boss – but they’re not. That’s because hackers have launched a coordinated AI voice clone phishing attack targeting investment banks across the country. The sophisticated attacks, which mimicked key executives’ voices, attempted to trick employees …

The phone call started like a routine fraud alert. American Express, or at least someone claiming to be American Express, told a customer that a second account had been opened in their name. Then came the twist. The new account, the caller said, had been used to buy child exploitation videos. That’s when the shock …

A voice message came from his Wu’s fathers WhatsApp Account. The voice matched his fathers exactly. It had the same speech patterns as his dad and the same urgency his busy father often had when he needed to close a business deal. His father needed HK$1 million (about $127,000) wired into a business friends account. …

David Reed doesn’t work for the government. He is a private citizen in North Carolina, and over the past six months, two car dealers have cut checks to the Justice Department for $3.6 million because of him. So what happened? He filed False Claims Act lawsuits against Jeff Wyler Automotive and Garber Management Group, two …

Kitboga – the nicest scam-baiter in the world – is back at it. Last week, during his live “Hunting AI Scammers” show, he manipulated a scammer’s own artificial intelligence bot into confessing what it was built to do. The scam bot picked up his call as an agent named Cindy who worked for the “processing …

Every night in March of this year, a man who called himself the “night officer” watched a college professor sleep. It was not in person, but rather on a Microsoft Teams video call. He was making sure she did not escape from her home and monitoring her every move. His feed came from the college …

I was browsing Telegram, and a wild recruiting advertisement caught my eye. The job is called “Face Motion Video Project,” and it offers recruits $7 for a few minutes of work. But that work involves uploading selfie videos of themselves, and it’s highly unclear what those videos could be used for. I suspect fraud. The …

Some of the people found out that they had been robbed of their identities when a detective showed them a short video of their own face. On the screen, they were smiling, blinking, and turning their heads, but the clips they watched were not real. Israeli investigators say the videos were generated using artificial intelligence …

Her name is AI Ko. She isn’t real. She is an AI, created by the police in Osaka to help educate residents about the rising threat of digital arrest sweeping across Japan. She speaks in a calm voice, even as she walks viewers through the terrorizing scam that many are falling for. Is she effective? …

A new kind of phone farm is being used in dating scams. And they are going to look a lot more human than the old bot farms. Mechanical fingers and robotic AI are now being used to swipe, type, and interact on social media in a way that has never been seen before. Videos posted …

Gary Hilburn pressed the little red woodpecker on his phone because a man on the other end of the Facetime call told him it was the only way that he could claim his prize. That tap was a huge mistake. By the next morning in April, his Wells Fargo savings account was drained and so …

Fake dealer websites selling non-existent cars, tractors, and heavy equipment are popping up all over the internet, luring victims by the hundreds every month. I wrote about this scheme last year which has now exploded to hundreds of sites. The sites look professional. Many impersonate real dealers in small towns, complete with stolen photos, AI-generated …

By the time the HR representative dialed into what was supposed to be a routine exit interview, the employee on the other end of the call had not actually worked at the company for close to five years. He was an imposter recruited by his bosses to dial in to the call and read a …

On the night of May 11th, police officers walked into a tourist hotel in the surf town of Midigama and found something you wouldn’t normally find on a beach. Twenty-eight Indian men and five Nepalis were sitting in front of laptops. They had flown in on tourist visas. But they weren’t surfing. They were scamming. …

A rich businessman in Singapore was going to have a very bad day. A Zoom invitation arrived on his phone and it looked like the kind of message that a well-connected businessman might actually receive. The sender of the message was the Secretary of the Cabinet, and he was inviting him to a private meeting …