From the Reg:
Botnets are fulfilling law enforcement fears that online casinos could prove fertile ground for money laundering, according to a recent, little-noticed report by risk compliance firm Fortent.
Some are engaging in variations of an old casino scam, in which preprogrammed-to-lose bots transfer dirty money - obtained through stolen credit cards, illicit drug sales or whatnot - to a chosen winner. Others flood a room and conspire to defraud a legitimate player by leveraging the mathematical advantage inherent in knowing more of the cards. Another scam involves spamming a known player in the hopes of stealing password and account information, and then bleeding the account dry through the fraudulent games described above.
Fulltiltpoker.com apparently got hit by a botnet attack recently and refunded money to the defrauded customers. A USA Today tally last month estimated that $2.5 mil to $3.5 mil per year are laundered this way.
“We are definitely seeing activity by bot-herders in online casino games, which is something we hadn’t seen before,” Symantec security analyst Zulfikar Ramzan noted.
What took them so long to attack the casinos? I guess there is just too much money to be made in the spam business.
Read on.
Tags: Spam, Botnet, Bots, Online Casinos Attacked, Online Fraud
