Feb 01, 2025Ravie LakshmananCybercrime / Fraud Prevention
In an effort to destroy a system of online marketplaces that originates in Pakistan, U.S. and French law enforcement organizations have announced that they have destroyed 39 domains and their related servers.
The activity, which took place on January 29, 2025, has been codenamed Operation Heart Blocker.
The large number of websites in question were bribe-selling hacking software and creating fraud, and Saim Raza, a company that operates websites since at least 2020, is also known as HeartSender.
Transnational organized crime organizations then used these offers to target a number of Americans victims in different business email compromise ( ) schemes, resulting in losses totaling more than$ 3 million.
” The Saim Raza-run websites operated as marketplaces that advertised and facilitated the sale of tools such as phishing kits, scam pages, and email extractors, often used to build and maintain fraud operations”, the U. S. Department of Justice ( DoJ) .
Saim Raza made these tools widely available online, as well as providing end users with instruction on how to use them against victims by linking to detailed YouTube videos to use these destructive programs, making them accessible to legal actors lacking this specialized criminal knowledge.
The DoJ added that the tools that were featured on the markets made it possible to obtain target consumer credentials, which were then used to advance the deceptive schemes.
French police the criminal organization sold a number of programs to encourage electronic fraud, which could be used by cybercriminals to phish emails at a higher rate or to steal login credentials, in a coordinated statement. Before it shut down, the company is thought to have had a large number of clients.
By visiting the URL “www.” people can test if they are one of the victims of token fraud. politie [. ] nl/checkjehack” and entering their email lists.
Independent security journalist Brian Krebs initially exposed the crime object in May 2015, with a statement from DomainTools last year operational security gaps that suggested some systems associated with the threat actors have been compromised by stealer malware.
The company that despite lacking the technical sophistication that another significant cybercrime vendors do, their most notable feature is that they are one of the first phishing-focused cybercrime marketplaces to diagonally integrate their business model while also expanding their operations to some individually branded stores.
Evidence suggests that members of The Manipulaters have joined, and at least one of the group’s earlier people have left. They appear to have a natural appearance in Pakistan, including Lahore, Fatehpur, Karachi, and Faisalabad”.
At the end of January 2025, a coordinated law enforcement activity dubbed Talent was launched, which included the elimination of online criminal markets like Cracked, Nulled, Sellix, and StarkRDP.
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