A massive operation that has reportedly siphoned millions of USD from credit cards since its launch in 2019 has been exposed and is considered responsible for losses for tens of thousands of victims.
The site operators, thought to originate from Russia, operate an extensive network of bogus dating and customer support websites and use them to charge credit cards bought on the dark web.
This way, the charges appear legitimate, and the websites are not readily approving fund returns on the grounds of fraudulent transactions, resulting in the enrichment of the crime syndicate behind the operation.
The discovery and report about the global operation come from researchers at ReasonLabs, who shared their findings with BleepingComputer before publication.
Massive website network
The operation uses two kinds of domains that serve as the basis of the operation, namely, dating sites and customer support portals.
Some of the fake dating sites found by ReasonLabs (ReasonLabs)
When visiting the websites for the companies of some of these alleged dating sites, we found that the corporate sites did not exist or had non-existent email addresses, such as '[email protected].'
Although functional, these sites don't receive noticeable traffic and are ranked very low in Google Search results, as the purpose of their existence isn't to draw victims but allegedly to serve as money laundering channels.
Traffic type on one of the fraudulent sites (ReasonLabs)
ReasonLabs says the sites have the same HTML structure and content, so they appear to have been created by automated tools.
Two of the customer support sites (ReasonLabs)
According to ReasonLabs, the customer support portals either use a fak ..
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