Why Nigerian Internet fraudsters target Chinese, HK bank accounts — Report

West Africa ’ s infamous Internet scammers have evolved, dropping their impersonations of online love interests, princes and United States soldiers in favour of hijacking corporate emails, costing businesses hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

It is a much more lucrative venture that works by gaining access to corporate email login details or passing off almost -identical addresses as the real deal, a scam known as Business Email Compromise, according to a report by cybersecurity firm , CrowdStrike , issued on Thursday.

These Nigerian rackets now dwarf other types of online criminal theft , amounting to at least $5. 3bn of losses between October 2013 and the end of 2016, according to the CrowdStrike and the US FBI ’ s Internet Crime Complaint Center.

“ There’ s a disproportionate amount of criminal gains they get from it, ” the Vice – President of Intelligence at the California -based CrowdStrike , Adam Meyers , told Reuters.

“ The lion’ s share of ill- gotten , fraudulent money is around these business email compromise attacks . It’ s a huge problem for our customer set, ” he added .

Nigeria has become one of the hubs of BEC . Nigerian online fraudsters , known as “ Yahoo boys” , became notorious for trying to pass themselves off as people in financial need or Nigerian princes offering an outstanding return on an investment.

The capers became known as “ 419 scams ” after the section of the national penal code that dealt – ineffectively – with fraud .

“ Yahoo boys” even impersonated a US forces commander in Afghanistan to defraud people by asking for help in recovering the assets of deceased soldiers.

It forced the commander to issue a Facebook statement saying he would never try to contact anyone asking for financial help.

Now the scammers have bigger fish to fry , with the potential gains amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars a year , according to CrowdStrike .

Behind the fraudsters is an organised crime network with its hands in human trafficking , drugs, prostitution , money laundering and email fraud and cybercrime, according to the CrowdStrike report .

“ The magnitude of this criminal threat has only recently begun to be understood, ” it said .

The Black Axe gang sprang from Nigerian universities and now extends from Africa to North America , Europe and Asia .

Its targets have ranged from semiconductor makers to schools in the US states including Connecticut and Minnesota , passing themselves off as executives and lawyers to trick employees into wiring sometimes millions of dollars a day into bank accounts .

From there , the money is quickly laundered through a series of bank accounts that can be traced to Hong Kong and China , where the trail often goes cold because diverging regulations foil monitoring, CrowdStrike ’ s Meyers said .

With that money, the Nigerian scammers are often enjoying the high life, according to Meyers , noting that social media accounts are filled with pictures of them posing with luxury Mercedes cars, gold watches, jewellery and champagne.

“ It ’ s really hard to stop; you can’ t stop it with anti – virus or any kind of software , it’ s really kind of a human problem. ”