A fake Paypal website, which was essentially phishing, asked users to confirm their account by sending a selfie photo of themselves holding their ID.
Her fake website PayPal tricked its victims by presenting a copy of the Paypal login page where it prompted users to log in by providing the code τους , και επιπρόσθετα τα data of their credit card, and ... a selfie of the user that would clearly hold their identity.
The issue was brought to the attention of PhishMe security investigators, and according to their report, the scammer was trying to direct users via emails to a phishing PayPal web page, written in Wordpress, located in New Zealand.
At this time, this phishing website has been removed. Its URL did not resemble that of Paypal, so users who had some phishing experience would have to immediately notice that they were on a page with the wrong address.
In the first authentication of users, the website asked users to write their name and password. But the scammer was not satisfied. Once someone entered their password on this page, the scammer was sure they were dealing with a careless or uneducated user, and so proceeded to request more information. During the duration In a four-step process, the website asked for the user's address, credit card details, and a selfie of them holding their ID.
It is not clear why the scammer wanted these information. Her specialist PhishMe Mr Chris Sims believes he wanted them to "create cryptocurrency accounts, to launder money stolen from other victims."
Of course this technique with the selfie, where the victim holds his identity in the hand, is not done for the first time. In October of 2016, McAfee had discovered a variant of Acecard Android's banking trojan, which also asked users when they connected their mobile to their bank account, to take a selfie holding their identity.
The tactics were quite innovative at the time, and several articles were written about it. So he probably gave the idea to the current scammer and decided to adapt it to his phishing.
The "selfie mission" process on the current site is odd. Instead of relying on WebRTC or Flash to access the user's webcam to take a user and save it automatically, the scammer asks users to upload a photo from their computer. This means more hassle as the user has to take out a selfie, transfer it to the computer, and then load it on the page of the scammer. Extending the attack in this way gives the user more time to observe something wrong on the wrong Paypal website and stop the process.
In addition, there is a second issue. Phishing websites usually do not have rules in the form of the validation format, and they take whatever users upload. This phisher had special rules for the format of the photos and requested only JPEG, JPG or PNG format.
The fraudster also made mistakes. The user's photo was not stored on a server under the scammer's control, but sent the data to an e-mail address in "oxigene [.] 007 @ Yandex [.] Com."
Sims says he searched for this address in the Skype user list and found a person called "Najat Zou," from "Mansac, France." Of course this information is not credible to determine his or her nationality or location user, simply provide a first step from which police officers may start investigating if they decide to investigate the matter further.