How cybercriminals seized Corona aid – one participant reports

The state wants to help the self-employed and small business owners in the Corona crisis quickly and as unbureaucratically as possible. Because once someone is broke, any emergency aid comes too late. The disadvantage of this is that if a lot of money is cut out in a short time with little scrutiny, then this also calls criminals on the plan. In Berlin, the Landeskriminalamt is currently investigating Arab clans who are alleged to have wrongly received emergency aid – and numerous cases are likely to appear elsewhere.

Cybercriminals have already caused particularly great damage in North Rhine-Westphalia. Organized scammers set up several fake websites there that resembled the official portals for requesting Corona help. They used this to collect the data of up to 4,000 applicants and redirect the money to their own accounts. Until the fraud sites could be taken off the net, the state of NRW was even forced to suspend the payments completely. The investigation is ongoing.

Research by ZDF magazine “Frontal21” now shows how the perpetrators organized themselves. The creators of the investigative programme tracked down one of the perpetrators involved on the internet and talked to him about the collaborative actions of the criminals. “I kind of work full-time as a fraudster and have been doing this for years,” the anonymous person told reporters via an encrypted chat.

“I’ll tip you with money”

In this he also presented a chat log, which is supposed to show his communication with the operator of the fake websites. “Transfers from 8000 euros, name of the recipient does not matter, 1.4 million payments there,” writes the alleged head behind the fraud websites. “I’ll tip you with money, you don’t believe that.”

The frontal 21 interlocutor describes his role in the “digital bank robbery of the year,” as he calls the action itself, as that of a henchman responsible for money laundering. “I’m just a middleman. I buy a bank account, which someone else has opened about someone else, that’s where the Corona Aids go. I wash these over three or four other accounts, change them into Bitcoin.”

The investigating Chief Prosecutor Markus Hartmann, Head of the Central and Contact Point Cybercrime North Rhine-Westphalia (ZAC NRW), confirms to Frontal 21 that criminals are heavily involved in actions such as the Coronahilfe-Klau. In the deep web, a veritable underground economy has been formed for this purpose: “Certain disciplines specialize in the development of malware, the next on the offering of bank accounts through which payments are smuggled. The third ones have special expertise in website programming and through marketplaces on the Internet, these different specializations come together and thus in many cases enable professional participation in the act,” hartmann reports. This situation does not make the investigation any easier.

You can see the full article in the ZDF-Mediathek