Snuffed & Purloined #4: Bizarro Trojans & Bovine Crime
It's like if Louis L'Amour and William Gibson co-authored a book together.
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The first story follows up on a link we shared a couple days back about a trojan virus that targets user banking credentials, which is sweeping across Europe and South America.
The malware, dubbed “Bizarro”, originated in Brazil and has been sniffed out attacking up to 70 banking institutions in Europe — mainly Italy, France, Portugal, and Spain.
There are several routes that the trojan can be delivered to the user’s device: spammy emails, SMS texts, or infected apps.
Once inside your machine, Bizarro gets to work executing up to 100 different commands that pilfer banking credentials and send them back to the cybercriminals.
This sort of malware isn’t new — but it demonstrates how these malware operations are scaling to impact more users at once.
I said it in a previous dispatch, but I have heard of cases like this in Asia as well. So be on the alert, as the problem is unlikely to stay cordoned off in South America or Europe.
Another sort of crime gets a nod in Vancouver, Canada, as authorities struggle to deal with crooks who use age-old alternative banking systems from Islamic and Chinese culture to launder money and transfer illicitly gained funds.
Muslims call it “hawala" and the Chinese dub their system “daigou,” but Canadian cops see an underground banking system that exploits financial regulatory loopholes.
The Mounties were tipped off to the alt-banking practices when investigating money laundering activity in the western province of B.C.
Chinese high-rollers dumped millions of dollars into slots and on tables — cash that slipped into their hands at Vancouver-based “daigou banks”, which sprouted up in B.C. in the 19th century with the arrival of Chinese immigrants.
The typical daigou network, which have been plotted by UK investigators, resembles an impenetrable maze that mixes up clean and dirty money in its labyrinthine bowels.
The daigou is a word that’s also been associated with “professional Chinese shoppers abroad” who raid stores for valuable good, such as infant formula, which are hard to obtain on mainland China.
The Main Streeter plans to do a deep-dive into the daigou financial system in a future weekend dispatch, and they will be a regular feature of our daily reporting — we’ve even got a Google Alert set up for them.
Everybody’s gotta make a buck, but there’s the right way to do it and the wrong way — and I don’t mean in the eyes of the law.
What I mean is there are lines you don’t cross, and you most people can feel where those lines are in their gut.
One of those ethical lines was catapulted over by the merchants who send out live kittens and puppies through China’s postal system, which end in many of the animals dead.
Sending live animals is part of the “mystery box” craze that’s swept up China into a buying frenzy. The consumer buys a box, not knowing what’ll be inside — it could be anything from a rare collectible figurine, to a smartphone, a watch, or even a little puppy.
Video of the whimpering little creatures boxed up in the back of a shipping truck hit the Chinese social media site Weibo recently — as a frenzy of netizens condemned the merchants.
I like the idea of a mystery box, and I’d probably buy one myself. Just leave out the puppies, please.
Peter Foster, an Aussie man who has made a career out of cons and frauds, failed to appear to a court appearance — and a warrant has now been issued for his arrest.
The conman is accused of bilking more than $2 million from a Hong Kong man in a crypto-currency scam. The transfers took place in 2019 and 2020, and the bitcoin is now valued at over $6 million.
Charges against Mr. Foster have been dropped, according to the report.
The judge described discussions about the case at the court as like “something out of Lewis Carroll: curiouser and curiouser”.
Mr. Foster has a rap sheet longer than my bill after a proper piss up — and he’s been imprisoned in Australia, the United States, and the UK, and Vanuatu — which just leaves me wondering: how does he keep getting away with it?
Cattle rustling and mysterious murders were the bread and butter for legendary western novelist Louis L’Amour — and I can’t deny that I’ve always been a fan of those stories that transport you back to those simpler times when all you needed was a gun, a woman, and a horse.
But if you thought bovine crime was a thing of the past, think again: one cow farmer, Joey Nelson, has been indicted by a federal grand jury in a $215,000 cattle fraud scheme that ended in the death of two brothers.
Another farmer who did business with Joey shared his story with reporters — it involved Joey mistreating his cows, letting them starve, and not handling his side of business arrangements.
Other local farmers warned that Joey was a crook and a thief, too.
The story reminds me of another bovine crime from back in March, when a man pleaded guilty to a $244 million ghost cattle scam.
What’s a ghost cattle scam, you ask? The farmer billed other companies for cattle feed that was meant for cows that simply didn’t exist.
And it makes me wonder — what in the hell did this guy do with $244 million? From the DOJ doc itself:
Easterday used the fraud proceeds for his personal use and benefit, and for the benefit of Easterday Ranches, including to cover approximately $200 million in commodity futures contracts trading losses that Easterday had incurred on behalf of Easterday Ranches.
Covering trading losses on commodity speculating.
This is a hell of a story and it’s one that’s on the calendar for The Main Streeter to cover in full.
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