Authorities in ten countries have recently launched an operation to find and arrest fraudsters who target corporate emails , defraud employees and steal money. The operation is known as Operation Rewired and has resulted in 281 arrests in the past four months .
Authorities have seized approximately $3.7 million from the fraudsters and have recovered approximately $118 million, which had been transferred to third-party accounts through fraud.
More than half of the arrests (167) were made in Nigeria. According to reports, 105 of the 167 arrests were made in the Port Harcourt region, in southern Nigeria.
The remaining suspects were found in 9 different countries.
The Justice Department reported 74 arrests in the United States, 18 in Turkey and 15 in Ghana. The other countries where suspects were found are Italy, France, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia and the United Kingdom.
All of the suspects arrested were involved in a specific type of scam. hacking . They mainly targeted corporate emails. In this scam, hackers compromise the account of a (usually) senior executive of a company and send emails to employees or associates asking for payments or large sums of money to be transferred to their accounts.
This type of attack has evolved a lot in recent times and is one of the most successful and profitable scams.
An FBI showed that American companies lost over $1.3 billion in 2018 due to this fraud.
The FBI also published another report, according to which companies and users around the world lost more than $26 billion from June 2016 to July 2019.
These numbers have prompted authorities in America and around the world to take action to combat the attacks. Since January 2018, US agencies have been searching for the fraudsters behind these scams.
The first arrests were made in June 2018. Authorities managed to arrest 74 suspects, seize approximately $2.4 million, and recover $14 million, which had been illegally transferred.
Recently, in August 2019, were indicted , most of whom were Nigerian nationals.
According to the Justice Department, some of the suspects weren't just stealing money. They were accessing corporate emails to steal personal information and financial documents, which they used for other scams. The 281 suspects had stolen more than 250,000 identities and filed more than 10,000 tax returns. Their goal was to get $91 million in tax refunds.
