Russian crime forums have been using the home-sharing service to shuffle
around cash under the table, sometimes with the help of legitimate
Airbnb hosts.
By Joseph Cox
As a recently unsealed indictment against former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort showed, not even Airbnb is safe from money launderers. But Manafort isn’t the only one
allegedly funneling dirty money through the mega-popular accommodation
service. Scammers are leveraging Airbnb to launder dirty cash from
stolen credit cards, according to posts on underground forums and
cybersecurity researchers consulted by The Daily Beast.
The news shows how fraudsters will seize any opportunity
they can, especially when there is an opening for pushing cash through
online services, which sometimes require relatively little effort, a
computer, and just a bit of creativity.
“People [have] been doing it forever,” one current and experienced credit-card scammer told The Daily Beast.
The
Daily Beast found a number of recent posts on several Russian-language
crime forums, in which users were looking for people to collaborate with
to abuse Airbnb’s service. According to Rick Holland, VP of strategy
from cybersecurity firm Digital Shadows, these operations rely on an
individual or group using legitimate or stolen Airbnb accounts to
request bookings and make payments to their collaborating Airbnb host.
The host then sends back a percentage of the profits, despite no one
staying in the property.
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Source: The Daily Beast
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