Where your money ends up after a scam
4/30/202624 min
Once scammers successfully steal someone’s money, they need a place to stash it. So they are buying verified Canadian bank accounts in order to launder money. In the last 12 months, a Canadian cybercrime research firm identified 4,337 social media posts offering to purchase accounts.
The people who allow scammers to use their accounts are known as “money mules”. Many become implicated in the crime, even if they are recruited without knowing they are being used to launder money.
Alexandra Podazki is the Globe’s financial and cybercrime reporter. Today, she joins the show to explain what exactly is happening with this black market for verified bank accounts and why the demand for money mules seems to be growing.
Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at thedecibel@globeandmail.com
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsCheryl Sutherland· Host0:00
[bell dings] We hear about people getting scammed out of their money, but what happens after that? Where does the money go? The answer is often a complex trail of verified bank accounts that get repurposed by scammers, and how scammers get to these accounts is often by recruiting people through social media. People who answer these posts can become something called a money mule and sometimes unknowingly participate in a crime. Alexandra Posadski is The Globe's financial and cybercrime reporter, and she's been looking into these cases. She's on the show to explain who is being targeted, what happens once a scammer gets ahold of one of these accounts, and what financial institutions are doing to try to stop these incidents from happening. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Hi, Alex. Thanks so much for coming back on the show.
Alexandra Posadzki· Guest1:03
Hey, great to be here.
Cheryl Sutherland· Host1:04
So we know that once a scammer gets money from a victim, they're on the hunt for a regular or a verified bank account. Why do they want this specific kind of account?
Alexandra Posadzki· Guest1:14
Essentially, they need a way to move the money that they have stolen from a scam victim and get it into their own hands, into their own bank accounts, or often offshore to a place where local law enforcement can no longer seize those funds.