Greg Smith - “eTrade Used In Banking Fraud”
http://www.officialwire.com/main.php?action=posted_news&rid=66134&catid=817
eTrade Used In Banking Fraud
Russian influence tries a new twist on a well-worn scam
Greg Smith | May 24, 2008
NEW YORK, NY — Bank Fraud Frances Dimmick appears to be the front man (read: disposable identity) for a ‘Moscow-based’ operation that targets random email addresses with the offer of employment. The job involves laundering money on behalf of REM Capital Limited, a company that hosts a website at [www.remcapitalltd.com and www.remcapitalltd.biz].
After the first email and your positive reply, Denis Naumenko steps in and switches to his Gmail account [work.remcapital@gmail.com]. Naumenko calls himself the regional manager for REM Capital. He operates his banking scam with a toll free number [800-360-2319] that used to belong to Shoutfitters.com, but according to Brandi Gilbert, owner of Shoutfitters, there’s no connection — it’s just that Gilbert hasn’t gotten around to removing the toll free number from his website (yet).
According to REM Capital’s website, they “specialize[s] in trading separate managed accounts for individual and institutional investors and market-making in the Russian and other emerging derivatives markets”.
REM Capital has two job opportunities on offer — Client Account Specialist and Senior Client Account Specialist — the difference being a senior client account specialist is permitted to use his or her company bank account to launder more money on behalf of REM Capital. ‘Employees’ using their personal account are limited to just $100,000 per month in illicit funds.
For your trouble, Naumenko / REM Capital agree to pay you 2% (two percent) of the total money you launder, plus the bank fees you pay when you send the cash onwards, presumably to Naumenko or his associates. We never got this far because not surprisingly, Naumenko never sent any money to our bank account.
We decided to use our Washington Mutual (WAMU) bank account because it was on Naumenko’s list of “preferred banks”. Naumenko writes: “In order to qualify as a Senior Client Account Specialist, you need to act as a business entity and also set up a business checking account with one of our preferred banks (from most to least preferable: Wells Fargo, Washington Mutual Bank, Citibank, Citizens Bank, Bank Of The West, BB&T, PNC Bank, 5/3 Bank, Provident Bank, Key Bank, US Bank, Chase Bank, Regions Bank). Please note that Bank Of America is NOT on our preferred list and, unfortunately, we will not be able to schedule a transfer into a BoFA account.”
Bank of America account holders you can now breathe a sigh of relief — your money is safe. On the other hand, Well Fargo appears to be the fraudster’s dream bank.
Once we signed up, we received two sets of micro-payments from eTrade bank. Micro-payments are used by many companies to verify your control over a bank account and to confirm your identity.
We reported these two sets of payments to eTrade because it should not be possible for someone else to use your bank account and eTrade should have caught this obviously fraudulent transaction, but they didn’t. Their “back office” people told us it was probably just a mistake — that someone must have entered in the wrong account number — that lots of people have WAMU accounts. “Don’t worry”, they said. We were not worried, but we were surprised by their apparent lack of concern when we were reporting an actual fraudulent attempt to use eTrade and our bank account to launder money.
We also reported it to WAMU and they took the matter seriously enough to tell us that they would put a trace on the transactions. After two weeks, we have not received any update on their trace.
One month after being “hired” by Naumenko we’re still waiting for the deluge of cash from Naumenko or his partners in crime — as of this writing we have still not received anything.
Of course, when we started our investigation (toying with Naumenko), we removed the balance from our WAMU account so that he could not. Others might not be so intuitive, so take notice of the pattern of this particular fraud and realize that most of the frauds on the Internet promise huge rewards and they are obvious (as fraud) because of the large amounts of money they promise. Naumenko has taken a different approach in his scam: the money you stand to make is quite low; just 2% — Hell, everyone knows that the going rate for laundering cash is north of 4%!
