A memory stick lost by an Australian police officer jeopardized an international investigation over a network of phishing frauds led by Russian Mafia.

As a result, personal details of 3500 costumer from 18 banks, including names and account numbers, where lost.
The responsibility of this serious error, is on the AHTCC (Australian High Tech Crime Centre) that misplaced a computer dossier on Russian Mafia phishing scams.
The matter is that this loss represents a huge threat both for bank users whose data are likely to be exposed, and both for the international police team who is investigating on this case, because all the operation has been wasted for the information leak...

 The documents were lost by an officer travelling to London to brief police forces, and in spite of a frantic search in Sidney, Singapore and London airports, the files were impossible to be found.

 The officer, not only broke several rules on transporting classified information, but he is also guilty of filing them in a memory stick containing other information on the AHTCC.

The astonishing aspect of this story is that the costumers who first fell victim to the phishing fraud providing to the crime gangs their bank details, now weren´t informed about data exposure.
This wasn´t an initiative of the banks but of the Australian High Tech Crime Centre itself , that hoped to hide the sensational leak.

Officially, the reason was that they didn´t want to inform criminals about the lost file, and the director of AHTCC, Kevin Zuccaro, reassured costumers asserting that people involved in the fraud is constantly under surveillance, so that further frauds are ruled out.

But according to the Australian, the magazine who first published the news, new frauds are not the worst treat: the dossier lost between Sidney and London was the result of a long and complicated international enquiry, and it included the names of witnesses and suspects both in Australia and in eastern Europe, and the details of 5600 fraudolent transactions, where costumer names, zip codes and banking institutions, bank accounts and bank branch numbers are clearly reported.

A big, big trouble to handle...

Comments Index (Total Messages: 1)

not happy Written by hiddensphinx on 2006-06-29 22:48:11

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