Cybercriminals working in the open on groups hosted by Facebook
Discovered by security company Cisco Talos, major illegal sales groups have been banned from Facebook.
Abusing groups on Facebook
Cisco Talos researchers, security specialists, have just highlighted some surprising practices. Indeed, it appears that large groups hosted on Facebook have no other reason to exist than to resell various stolen items, or to offer subscribers with impunity what is nothing more than scams.
We already know of some illegal trafficking on social networks, including some money laundering cases discovered last month, that thugs were engaged in by exploiting the networks and community of Airbnb and Uber services.
However, the situation seems to be growing, since this time, there are no fewer than 74 private groups, bringing together nearly 385,000 Facebook subscribers themselves who frequent this type of environment. It seems that the resellers had sniffed out a potential market through the considerable community of the number one social media company.
Illegal activities that taint social networks
This phenomenon, which may seem surprising in view of the fact that we imagine that an illegal resale necessarily takes place in the shadows, therefore occurs before our eyes and without any particular safety precautions. For criminals, it seems that the bigger the string, the more it passes.
As proof, Cisco Talos IT specialists were able to see that all they had to do was search using keywords such as “CVV” or “carding” on Facebook’s search engine to land in the middle of groups on which to find objects of dubious provenance at a lower price.
On Facebook’s side, it is considered that “these groups have violated our existing policies against spam and financial fraud, so we have deleted them to prevent them from continuing to operate illegally on our platform. We know that in the future we will have to be more vigilant. Moreover, we have decided to invest more in the fight against this type of illegal activity.
