Cyber-enabled crimes cost Georgia residents almost $144 million in 2021, with losses attributed to business email compromise schemes, investment scams, and confidence or romance scams topping the list of frauds. Nationally, these losses are in the billions. The Georgia Cyber Fraud Task Force, which investigates and prosecutes these cases, comprises local, state, and federal agencies throughout Georgia, committed to sustained community outreach, as well as training for law enforcement and prosecutors to better respond to cyber-enabled crime.
Cyber-fraudsters perpetrate these scams by utilizing a network of participants who each play an integral part in the success of the scam. One critical actor in these schemes is the “money mule”: the party responsible for opening a U.S. bank account, usually a business account, and accepting proceeds from a variety of frauds and forwarding the funds as directed, often to accounts overseas. The mission of the Georgia Cyber Fraud Task Force (CFTF) is to identify quality leads for investigation of suspected money mules in the Atlanta area and reduce the amount of time and resources necessary to impact those mules through judicial intervention.
Money mules act as a sort of contractor in the economy of cyber-enabled fraud, rather than the perpetrator interacting with a victim. The money flowing into money mule accounts represents proceeds from a variety of fraud types and numerous victims, and the money may flow out to second-tier recipients who remain unaware of one another. The anonymity with which these fraud schemes operate works to the advantage of the perpetrators. The sheer volume of victims who funnel money into a mule’s account – who may operate more than a dozen bank accounts – poses a daunting obstacle for law enforcement.
Untangling the web of bank accounts associated with a single mule, and the victims who deposited money into those accounts, may require more than a year of law enforcement time and…
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