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thrive

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Registered: 2023-01-04

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CryptosLabs Scam Ring Prey on French-Speaking Investors & Raises €480M

Since April 2018, users of French-speaking people in France, Belgium, and Luxembourg have been the target of a scam network known as CryptosLabs, whose operations have been revealed by cybersecurity researchers. It is estimated that since April 2018, CryptosLabs has generated illegal profits of €480 million by preying on these users.

Group-IB said in a deep-dive report that the syndicate's massive fake investment schemes primarily involve posing as 40 reputable banks, fin-techs, asset management companies, and cryptocurrency platforms while establishing a scam infrastructure spanning over 350 domains hosted on more than 80 servers.

The business with its headquarters in Singapore claimed that the criminal organization is "operated by a hierarchy of kingpins, sales agents, developers, and call center operators" who are hired to lure potential victims in by promising them large returns on their investments.

"CryptoLabs made their scam schemes more convincing through region-focused tactics, such as hiring French-speaking callers as'managers' and creating fake landing pages, social media ads, documents, and investment platforms in the French language," said Anton Ushakov, deputy head of Group-IB's high-tech crime investigation department in Amsterdam.

"To better connect with and successfully exploit their target audience, they even impersonated French-dominant businesses. ".

It all begins with luring targets through advertisements on social media, search engines, and forums devoted to online investments, pretending to be an "investment division" of the impersonated organization and offering them alluring investment plans in an effort to obtain their contact information.

Swindle Network CryptosLabs.

Next, call center representatives approach them and give them more information about the fraudulent platform and the credentials needed to conduct trading.

After logging in, the victims add money to a virtual balance, according to Ushakov. "They are then shown fictitious performance charts, which encourage them to invest more money in order to make more money, until they realize they cannot withdraw any money even after paying the "release fees. '".

While the initial deposits range from $200 to $300, the scam is designed to persuade victims to deposit more money by creating the appearance that their investments are doing well.

The large-scale scam-as-a-service operation was first brought to light by Group-IB in December 2022, and it claims to have been able to trace the first indications of the group's activity back to 2015, when it was discovered experimenting with various landing pages. After a two-month preparation period, CryptosLabs would begin its tryst with investment fraud in June 2018.

The use of a unique scam kit, which enables the threat actors to run, manage, and scale their operations at different stages, from bogus social media advertisements to the website templates used to pull off the heist, is a key selling point of the campaign.

Additional tools for creating landing pages, a CRM service that enables the addition of new managers to each domain, a leads control panel that fraudsters could use to onboard new clients to the trading platform, and a VoIP tool to communicate with victims in real-time are also included in the kit.

According to Ushakov's analysis of CryptosLabs, "the threat group has given its operations a well-established structure in terms of headcount and operations, and is likely to expand the scope and scale of its illicit business in the coming years.".