Apr 08, 2024NewsroomInvestment Scam / Mobile Security

Google has filed a lawsuit against two app developers for engaging in an “international online consumer investment fraud scheme” that tricked users into downloading bogus Android apps from the Google Play Store and other sources and stealing their funds under the guise of promising higher returns.

The individuals in question are Yunfeng Sun (aka Alphonse Sun) and Hongnam Cheung (aka Zhang Hongnim or Stanford Fischer), who are believed to be based in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, respectively.

The defendants are said to have uploaded about 87 crypto apps to the Play Store to pull off the social engineering scam since at least 2019, with over 100,000 users downloading them and leading to substantial financial losses.

“The gains conveyed by the apps were illusory,” the tech giant said in its complaint. “And the scheme did not end there.”

“Instead, when individual victims attempted to withdraw their balances, defendants and their confederates would double down on the scheme by requesting various fees and other payments from victims that were supposedly necessary for the victims to recover their principal investments and purported gains.”

While this kind of scam is typically referred to as pig butchering (aka shā zhū pán), Google said it “neither adopts nor endorses the use of this term.” It’s derived from the idea that victims are fattened up like hogs with the promise of lucrative returns before “slaughtering” them for their assets.

In September 2023, the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) said these scams are perpetrated by criminal enterprises based in Southeast Asia that employ hundreds of thousands of people who are trafficked to the region by promising them high-paying jobs.

The fraudulent scheme entails the scammers using elaborate fictitious personas to target unsuspecting individuals via social media or dating platforms, enticing them with the prospect of a romantic relationship to build trust and convince them to invest in cryptocurrency portfolios that purport to offer high profits within a short span of time with an aim to steal their funds.

To create the appearance of legitimacy, the financially motivated actors are known to fabricate websites and mobile apps to display a bogus investment portfolio with large returns.

Sun and Cheung, said Google, lured victim investors to download their fraudulent apps through text messages using Google Voice to target victims in the U.S. and Canada. Other distribution methods include affiliate marketing campaigns that offer commissions for “signing up additional users” and YouTube videos promoting the fake investment platforms.

The company described the malicious activity as persistent and continuing, with the defendants “using varying computer network infrastructure and accounts to obfuscate their identities, and making material misrepresentations to Google in the process.”

It also accused them of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), carrying out wire fraud, and breaching the Google Play App Signing Terms of Service, Developer Program Policies, YouTube’s Community Guidelines, as well as the Google Voice Acceptable Use Policy.

“Google Play can continue to be an app-distribution platform that users want to use only if users feel confident in the integrity of the apps,” Google added. “By using Google Play to conduct their fraud scheme, defendants have threatened the integrity of Google Play and the user experience.”

It’s worth noting that the problem is not limited to the Android ecosystem alone, as prior reports show that such bogus apps have also repeatedly made their way to the Apple App Store.

The development is the latest in a series of legal actions that Google has taken to avoid the misuse of its products. In November 2023, the company sued multiple individuals in India and Vietnam for distributing fake versions of its Bard AI chatbot (now rebranded as Gemini) to propagate malware via Facebook.

Mar 05, 2024NewsroomCybercrime / Malware

A new DNS threat actor dubbed Savvy Seahorse is leveraging sophisticated techniques to entice targets into fake investment platforms and steal funds.

“Savvy Seahorse is a DNS threat actor who convinces victims to create accounts on fake investment platforms, make deposits to a personal account, and then transfers those deposits to a bank in Russia,” Infoblox said in a report published last week.

Targets of the campaigns include Russian, Polish, Italian, German, Czech, Turkish, French, Spanish, and English speakers, indicating that the threat actors are casting a wide net in their attacks.

Users are lured via ads on social media platforms like Facebook, while also tricking them into parting with their personal information in return for alleged high-return investment opportunities through fake ChatGPT and WhatsApp bots.

The financial scam campaigns are notable for using DNS canonical name (CNAME) records to create a traffic distribution system (TDS), thereby allowing threat actors to evade detection since at least August 2021.

A CNAME record is used to map a domain or subdomain to another domain (i.e., an alias) instead of pointing to an IP address. One advantage with this approach is that when the IP address of the host changes, only the DNS A record for the root domain needs to be updated.

Savvy Seahorse leverages this technique to its advantage by registering several short-lived subdomains that share a CNAME record (and thus an IP address). These specific subdomains are created using a domain generation algorithm (DGA) and are associated with the primary campaign domain.

The ever-changing nature of the domains and IP addresses also makes the infrastructure resistant to takedown efforts, allowing the threat actors to continuously create new domains or alter their CNAME records to a different IP address as their phishing sites are disrupted.

While threat actors like VexTrio have used DNS as a TDS, the discovery marks the first time CNAME records have been used for such purposes.

Victims who end up clicking the links embedded on Facebook ads are urged to provide their names, email addresses, and phone numbers, after which they are redirected to the bogus trading platform for adding funds to their wallets.

“An important detail to note is the actor validates the user’s information to exclude traffic from a predefined list of countries, including Ukraine, India, Fiji, Tonga, Zambia, Afghanistan, and Moldova, although their reasoning for choosing these specific countries is unclear,” Infoblox noted.

The development comes as Guardio Labs revealed that thousands of domains belonging to legitimate brands and institutions have been hijacked using a technique called CNAME takeover to propagate spam campaigns.