Police Arrest 36 Cybercriminals in Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville Province

[sociopath]

Police Arrest 36 Cybercriminals in Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville Province

[vladimir]

LOL, too many episodes of Homeland watched, to be sure.

[Lucky Lucan]

Well done the GRK!

[electron]

Wow, bunch of cyber-fraud keyboard warriors get the full military SWAT treatment.
I thought that only happened in America.

[Lucky Lucan]

Maybe they weren't sure who they were up against. There's huge money in these operations, as shown by the numbers of perpetrators rounded up. You can't just send the commune police around to sort that out.

[sociopath]

glad you guys got it figured out and lucky lucan knows all about it how profitable it is but i couldnt see how they were kidnapping people over the internet

and shhh dont tell anyone but i got all this contraband stuff too

a lot of evidences such as money, passports, sim cards, electronic devices and other equipment for operation.

[Lucky Lucan]

i couldnt see how they were kidnapping people over the internet

I'm just guessing it's a bad translation and they were extorting people over the internet, or "holding them to ransom", there have been numerous cases of this.

[spitthedog]

I wonder what all these ''extortion'' cases involve exactly? Is it to do with online gambling being illegal in China?

[kiiniaew]

I'm not sure what they done exactly in this case. Over the years I have read about various operations:

- Blackmail: put a naked women/man in front of a cam and record the mark while he is naked, then tell him to wire money or the recording will be published online.

- Scam/Fraud: impersonate police or government and convince the mark of being liable to pay some type of fine.

Impersonate a bank or other financial institution and obtain online banking details. Once received clean out their accounts. (some banks still use a username/password combination without any 2-factor auth like SMS)

Let the mark believe they did win some kind of price however claiming it will incur some costs which have to be paid up front.

Etc.

Not really cybercrime, the only "cyber" involved is that most phone/video calls are placed over VOIP to spoof the numbers / hide the origin of the caller. Obviously they failed in the latter.

Sure they make some money but it is easy to track them and thus we see these arrests over and over again. If they were true cybercriminals they were more wealthy and free. CryptoMining (uploading some code and stealing CPU/GPU power to mine cryptocurrencies), Ransomware (encrypting a victim it's system/files) and Denial of Service (taking down / slowing down a system) are equally simple to pull off with a higher degree of anonymity.

The biggest money is made by being a hacker for hire to carry out targeted attacks on businesses or developing the tools (malware, exploits, av detection bypass, etc.)

[sociopath]

so the crime seems to be making lots of money without having to pay local interests