Naturally, one would expect a savvy scammer to use VPN in order to hide their exact location. This is not always the case with amateurish wanna-be-cyber-criminals who might not care much of their own anonymization. Many cases of crypto scam reveal that no VPN is used at all, so it is pretty easy to estimate a scammer’s location from their IP address. But even VPN usage won’t guarantee a scammer from their location detection if no attention is paid to some important details.
(more…)There are quite a few curious job ads appearing occasionally on freelance sites where people are seeking for help of experts in fraud, scam or cybersecurity related cases. We have picked here top three amazing and eyebrow-rising ones from Upwork.
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The most illustrative part of crypto scam investigation is visualizing the flow of funds through transactions and addresses associated with a scammer’s wallet. This method allows us to reveal related addresses or their clusters and also to track funds to certain centralized exchanges where they can be potentially cashed out. Additionally, we can also include in the graph other entities related to scammer in order to create a full picture.
We will approach this task using two different investigation tools: Maltego CE and GraphSense. Both tools are available for free in non-commercial versions.
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This post opens a series of articles dedicated to research of online crypto scam schemes orginated from Nigeria, which have emerged in the recent times on social media platform like Instagram, Facebook and Telegram. We are looking at these scams not only from a technical and investigative point of view (how exactly scam is commited), but also will touch social aspects of such crimes as well – why people are choosing this business of scamming others online this way.
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