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Showing posts with the label fraud

UK Cybercrime Journal: Argos Account Takeover Fraud

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What Happened On 3 June 2026, the City of London Police issued a warning stating Report Fraud has seen a significant increase in cases mentioning the retailer, reflecting how criminals are targeting well-known brands. Report Fraud, which is run by the City of London Police, warned that cybercriminals are using leaked credentials from historical data breaches to hijack Argos user accounts. Once on the account, the fraudsters order and then collect the goods in-person at a physical store. In some instances, the goods are paid for using payment details not connected to the victim of the compromised account. Notably, the goods from fraudulent orders are often claimed via Click & Collect option that Argos allows, enabling the threat actors to retrieve goods in store. In May, Report Fraud received 652 reports which mention Argos, a 323% increase compared to April, when 154 reports mentioning the retailer were made. Since the start of 2026, there have been 1,175 reports mentioning th...

UK Cybercrime Journal: £102 million Lost to Scams in 2025

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  What Happened On 5 May 2026, new data revealed that British romance scam victims were defrauded of a staggering £102 million last year, representing a 29% surge in reported cases. The figures come from information  gathered  by Report Fraud (f.k.a ActionFraud), which is a City of London Police-run service that logged 10,784 romance scam reports in 2025. According to the data, cybercriminals are reportedly pocketing roughly £280,000 everyday by exploiting online relationships, with individual losses averaging £9,500 and in extreme cases, reaching up to £1 million per victim.  This wave of scam victims is part of the growing trend where scammers blend emotional manipulation with fake cryptocurrency investment schemes, heavily weaponising AI-generated profiles, and focusing on lonely victims aged 55 to 74. Analyst Comment  When analysing fraud statistics, it is important to remember that underreporting is very common, with many victims staying silent out of shame...

Ofgem Energy Bill Rebate Phishing Fraud

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  On 3 February 2022, the The UK Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem) issued a warning that there has been a "record increase in global gas prices" which saw an "energy price cap rise of 54% "; adding that " Ofgem knows this rise will be extremely worrying for many people ". That last sentence is precisely why phishing threat actors are beginning to use Ofgem-themed lures as a pretext for phishing attacks to target and defraud UK-based users online.  On 17 May 2022, Ofgem issued a warning  " of a scam email claiming to be from Ofgem asking for bank details so customers can get a rebate " (see Figure 1). This was followed by an alert from UK Action Fraud stating it has  received "over 750 reports in just four days about these fake O fgem  emails". The UK NCSC also included the warning in its Weekly Threat Report. Figure 1: Ofgem-themed phishing email On 20 May 2022, while researching newly phishing pages a recently created Of...

Mobile Banking Phishing Campaign

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  There is no doubt that mobile banking has taken the world by storm. Another growth industry is digital-only banks, especially in the UK. As of January 2022, over a quarter (27%) of British adults have opened an account with a digital-only bank, equating to 14 million people. This has created a new pool of targets for phishing threat actors to create new campaigns for fraud. This blog will explore a recent and ongoing campaign targeting mobile users and digital-only banks.  Monzo is a popular digital-only bank in the UK. For years, users are able to open an account without having to visit a branch just by walking through the steps in the mobile application. One of the key parts to creating a Monzo account is verifying your device. Monzo will send you a "golden link" which you use to login to for the first time (see Fig. 1). This is what the phishing threat actors are after. Fig. 1 - Example "golden link" sent via Monzo to login to bank accounts Fig. 2 - Example SM...

Analysis of the latest PayPal phishing attacks

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As far as brands that get impersonated a lot, PayPal has got to be in the Top 5 or Top 3 globally. Between August and October, I personally received 19 PayPal credential phishing page links and my crud email provider (not Gmail or Outlook) didn't block them, so they've been landing in my inbox. So I took a look at them, natch.  I examined various phishing attempts that appear to be sent in a similar manner to my personal email, which has only appeared in one small breach in 2017, according to Have I Been Pwned for the record. One phishing kit stood out and forced my hand into blogging about it. It consisted of 11 parts, including the phishing email itself and the initial landing page; followed by several pages to harvest credit card and billing information, bank account details, and finally the bit that I'd not personally seen before (but I doubt is that new) was that it asked me to "Upload your identity".   The amount of personal data this phishing kit is harvest...

Mo Money, Mo Magecart

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Online shopping sites are prime targets for cybercriminals. Large sites can process vast quantities of personal information and payment data, making them a high-value reward if successfully hijacked. On 29 April, Malwarebytes Threat Intelligence shared a JavaScript web skimmer their team discovered on a compromised French Canadian online shoe store. The skimmer was injected into the online store's checkout page and used to siphon off payment data and billing info. Data entered into the site was exfiltrated to a domain in Russia. I pivoted off this domain and looked at what was hosted on the same IP with a similar naming convention. This led to uncovered multiple other domains used for web skimming. I mapped the domains on VirusTotal graph here: I then chucked these domains into URLscan and uncovered at least five other sites that have been compromised in these attacks: Some additional pivoting uncovered a skimmer masquerading as a Bing Analytics domain that was injected ...

Analysis of Meyhod JavaScript Web Skimmers

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  A new web skimmer, dubbed Meyhod, has been disclosed by RiskIQ. The malware (named after a typo in the code) appeared in October on several e-commerce sites, including the hair treatment company Bosley and the Chicago Architecture Center (CAC). While investigating the attacker's domain (jquerycloud[.]com) a bit further and other potential victims from this campaign were uncovered some months ago. This includes Doves Farm UK, The Fruit Company, Customer Earth Promos, and - due to the file names - potentially iCanvas or TFC: Active compromise of dovesfarm.co.uk: Skimmer 1: Identifier - sClass="yeikyd" - 'dovesfarm.js' (available here ) Skimmer 2: Identifier - sClass="frydbt" - 'icanvas.js' (available here ) Skimmer 3: Identifier - sClass="bfiyad" - 'tfc.js' (available here ) Skimmer 1 - Listener: Skimmer 2 and 3 - Listener: Skimmed Data: RC4 encryption: Data collected: Credit Card Number, Card Holder Name, CVV, expiry day, mont...