User-friendly apps allow anybody to serve as traffickers for cybercrime syndicates.
February 29, 2024 By Nate Nelson
Cybercriminals are laundering stolen funds through ordinary people, thanks to a small ecosystem of user-friendly apps that can turn any mobile user into an unwitting money mule.
A new report from Cloud SEK details one such app: "XHelper," an Android platform that connects scammers with citizens of India, whose job is to quickly receive and pass on stolen funds to shadowy third-parties. It sports a clean, user-friendly interface that makes the entire process rather simple, and serves to obscure both the nature of the payments, and who's on the other end of each transaction.
The app is enabling pig butchering, task, loan, and ecommerce scams, and illegal gambling operations, at a massive scale. It currently sports around 37,000 active users with around 16,000 verified bank accounts, and moves a massive 160 million rupees per day (just under US $2 million).
