crime - CybAI news

04 Dec

Celsius Founder Alex Mashinsky Pleads Guilty To Fraud

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Alex Mashinsky, former CEO of bankrupt crypto lender Celsius, has pleaded guilty to two counts of fraud, which together carry a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison.In the wake of the company’s collapse, the US Department of Justice charged Mashinsky with seven counts of fraud, conspiracy, and market manipulation. Having originally pleaded not guilty, he was set to face a criminal trial in the Southern District of New York in January.However, at a court hearing Tuesday, Mashinsky instead pleaded guilty to one count of commodities fraud and one count of securities fraud. Mashinsky has admitted to lying to Celsius…

29 Nov

Russia arrests ransomware attacker Wazawaka

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One of the world’s most notorious hackers could finally be in custody. reports that ransomware affiliate Mikhail Pavlovich Matveev also known as Wazawaka, Uhodiransomwar, m1x and Boriselcin has been arrested.Prosecutors have not confirmed if Matveev is under arrest, but reports indicate that Matveev may be the hacker in Russian custody. The Russian state news agency (translated on BlueSky by the Center for Strategic Research’s ) reported that the Kaliningrad Interior Ministry and Russian prosecutors sent a case of “a programmer accused of creating a malicious program” to court. An anonymous source with knowledge of the matter confirms that Matveev is…

24 Oct

Meet ZachXBT, the Masked Vigilante Tracking Down Billions in Crypto Scams and Thefts

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsbitcoin, blockchain, crime, cryptocurrency, fbi

As ZachXBT has pursued that career as a crypto vigilante, he has also kept his mask firmly in place. Online, he appears only as his avatar, a kind of platypus cartoon figure in a detective's trench coat or sometimes a hoodie. To avoid retaliation from his many enemies in the world of crypto criminals and con artists, he has never publicly shown his face nor revealed his real name or exact age and would only speak to WIRED on the condition that I not try to dig up those identifying details.On some of their early conference calls, McGill says, ZachXBT…

23 Oct

Nigeria Drops Charges Against Tigran Gambaryan, Jailed Binance Exec and Former IRS Agent

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For eight months, the criminal investigator who pioneered cryptocurrency tracing as a law enforcement technique has, in a bizarre twist of fate, been detained and then jailed in Nigeria facing charges of money laundering and tax evasion. Now, he may finally be coming home.On Wednesday in Abuja, a court ruled that criminal charges against Gambaryan, a Binance executive who previously served as an IRS criminal investigator for a decade, will be dropped on medical grounds as pressure from the US government has grown to secure Gambaryan's release.Gambaryan was detained in February and later jailed after being invited to the country…

22 Oct

Peter Todd Was ‘Unmasked’ As Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto. Now He’s In Hiding

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In the week before the documentary was released, online betting markets had Len Sassaman, a cryptographer who moved in similar online circles to Satoshi, as the most likely candidate to be revealed as the Bitcoin creator. Sassaman took his own life in 2011 at the age of 31, shortly after Satoshi disappeared.The case for Sassaman was first outlined in 2021 by Evan Hatch, founder of crypto gaming platform Worlds. Whenever speculation about Sassaman bubbles periodically to the surface, the spotlight is thrown on his widow, software developer Meredith Patterson, who believes the theory is unfounded.“People used to be really fucking…

21 Oct

In the Kentucky Mountains, a Bitcoin Mining Dream Becomes the Stuff of Nightmares

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsbitcoin, crime, cryptocurrency

In both cases, Biofuel claims, the firms shipped equipment from China to its hosting facility in Eastern Kentucky, then walked away with the bitcoin produced, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid energy bills and hosting fees.Biofuel reached a settlement with Touzi in early 2022 for $60,000, but despite having handed back the mining equipment, it claims not to have received the sum it is owed under the agreement.In the still-unresolved spat with VCV, Biofuel received permission from the Martin County Circuit Court in Kentucky to sell off the mining equipment, claims Whites, to recoup a portion of…

16 Oct

Two Sudanese brothers accused of launching a dangerous series of DDoS attacks

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Newly unsealed grand jury documents revealed that two Sudanese nationals allegedly attempted to launch thousands of distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks on systems across the world. The documents allege that these hacks aimed to cause serious financial and technical harm to government entities and companies and even physical harm in some cases. (DoJ) unsealed charges against Ahmed Salah Yousif Omer and Alaa Salah Yusuuf Omer that resulted in federal grand jury indictments. The two are allegedly connected to more than 35,000 DDoS attacks against hundreds of organizations, websites and networks as part of a “hacktivism” scheme as part of…

15 Oct

It Seemed Like an AI Crime-Fighting Super Tool. Then Defense Attorneys Started Asking Questions

stp2y0 CommentsAIartificial intelligence, crime, cybersecurity, police, privacy, surveillance

In 2017, then 9-year-old Kayla Unbehaun was abducted. For years, the South Elgin, Illinois police department searched for Unbehaun and her noncustodial mother, Heather Unbehaun, who was accused of the abduction, following her trail to Georgia, where they hit a dead end. During that time, the department signed a contract with Global Intelligence, and sergeant Dan Eichholz received a Cybercheck report that placed Unbehaun and her mother in Oregon, he tells WIRED. It was a new lead, but because Cybercheck didn’t provide any evidence to support its findings, Eichholz couldn’t use the report to obtain a search warrant.Unbehaun was finally…

12 Oct

Pig Butchering Scams Are Going High Tech

stp2y0 CommentsAIartificial intelligence, crime, cybersecurity, hacking, malware, security

As digital scamming explodes in Southeast Asia, including so called “pig butchering” investment scams, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) issued a comprehensive report this week with a dire warning about the rapid growth of this criminal ecosystem. Many digital scams have traditionally relied on social engineering, or tricking victims into giving away their money willingly, rather than leaning on malware or other highly technical methods. But researchers have increasingly sounded the alarm that scammers are incorporating generative AI content and deepfakes to expand the scale and effectiveness of their operations. And the UN report offers the…

09 Oct

69,000 Bitcoins Are Headed for the US Treasury—While the Agent Who Seized Them Is in Jail

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsbitcoin, blockchain, crime, cryptocurrency, dark web

In November of 2020, a person identified by the US Department of Justice only as “Individual X” sat down with an IRS agent named Tigran Gambaryan and prosecutors at the US Attorney’s office in San Francisco. That unnamed individual typed out the long string of characters of a Bitcoin private key on Gambaryan’s laptop, allowing Gambaryan to move 69,370 bitcoins from Individual X’s bitcoin address to one controlled by the US government.Over the four years that it has taken the US government to establish legal ownership of that massive sum of bitcoins—identified by the IRS as stolen proceeds of the…