Brazil: Cybercriminals opened 500,000 fake accounts with leaked e-mails

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – In 2021, the Brazilian population experienced countless data breaches, and criminals, taking advantage of third-party information, such as e-mails made publicly available on the internet, created 500,000 fake accounts. These profiles were used for numerous fraud attempts. The information is from a survey by the virtual security firm AllowMe, which also shows that the Brazilian population had to deal with 3.7 fraud attempts per minute during the past year.

The survey, entitled Device Fraud Scan 2022, analyzed 155.6 million interactions of Brazilian users with applications and websites from various sectors to understand the behavior of a fraudster on the internet.

In particular, criminals use compromised e-mails to leak personal information usually contained in them, which can then become vectors for changing passwords for services or even access to restricted systems related to the victim, thus facilitating the breach of privacy, whether personal or financial.

The study states that account theft was the scam most often applied by Brazilian fraudsters last year based on this data. The report’s list also includes other problems such as promotion abuse, friendly fraud, auto fraud, SIM Swap, synthetic identity, and account numerator.

The study also shows that most of the online fraud in the country targeted the financial sector. Loyalty programs, traditional banking institutions, fintechs, online rating systems, and cryptocurrencies were the segments most affected by malicious transaction threats.

Most of these offenses, 63.7%, occur when logging into a website or application, showing that criminals are primarily interested in ways to gain direct access to victims’ accounts – the focus of 3.7 scam attempts per minute suffered by the Brazilian population in 2021.

AllowMe explains that to consider a suspicious activity as fraud, its systems consider some factors, such as the time the action is being performed, the use of more than one account on the device, and unusual changes in the user’s geolocation.

Another factor taken into account by the company’s systems is where the accesses are being made from. For example, if an account is accessed by a user in a virtual machine already associated with other malicious practices, the chance of it being a possible fraud increases.

With this, the AllowMe study identified that at least 70% of the interactions identified as fraud had at least two behaviors considered suspicious by the company’s systems.

The time of the transaction was also taken into account, with the research stating that 70% of the identified frauds were done between 9 AM and 8 PM. The time that concentrates the highest number, at 11 AM, with 6.2% of the total, is also the one when the highest number of interactions happen.

After 9 PM, the average number of fraud attempts drops by half, with 1.6 fraud attempts per minute until 8 AM the next day – but the probability of a user being threatened in the early hours of the morning, defined by the ratio between the number of fraud attempts and the number of transactions, is still higher between midnight and 5:59 AM, with a 1.6% chance, according to the study.

With information from Folha de S.Paulo