To review this article, select My Profile and then View Recorded Stories.
To review this article, select My Profile and then View Recorded Stories.
Andy Greenberg
To review this article, select My Profile and then View Recorded Stories.
To review this article, select My Profile and then View Recorded Stories.
The Covid-19 pandemic, and millions of others desperate for infrequent protective devices such as Tyvek masks and suits, were a boon to the thieves. Now, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, it turns out that even ISIS has come into play.
In a series of civil and criminal court cases and forfeiture notices issued today, the Justice Department revealed that it had seized heaps of Bitcoin and Ethereum accounts, millions of dollars and 4 websites from well-known Islamic extremist teams that used those accounts and budget for terrorists. Operations. Prosecutors say cryptographic assets confiscated through the teams, which come with ISIS, the al-Qassam Brigades and Al-Qaeda, constitute “the largest seizure ever undertaken by the cryptocurrency government in the context of terrorism.” Cryptocurrency transport alone totals more than $1 million, according to Chainalysis, a blockchain-centric company whose equipment was used in research.
However, amid the jihadist fundraising efforts that the Department of Justice rejected, one of them stands out for being braided: court documents detail how an ISIS agent allegedly executed a fraudulent for non-public protective equipment Covid-19, or EPI, known as FaceMaskCenter.com.
ISIS’ involvement in the Covid-19 EPI scam industry is just one component of a wave of fraud that has flooded the Internet since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, said Mark Turner, executive leader of DarkOwl, a security company that tracked the Covid-19 Online Scam. For months. “We’ve noticed a large volume of illegitimate fabrics like the PPE sold and never delivered,” Turner says. “The fact that ISIS has made the decision to have interaction in this activity is not surprising. They’re all capitalists. They are also benefiting from the pandemic.”
According to a civil complaint, a confidential source linked an ISIS “facilitator” who used Murat Cakar’s pseudonym with the FaceMaskCenter.com operation, as well as 4 Facebook accounts that advertised the site. Cakar is believed to be guilty of managing several ISIS hacking operations; The complaint alleges that he earned $100,000 from Zoobia Shahnaz, an American who had planned to travel to Syria to enroll in ISIS and who pleaded guilty to terrorism in 2018 after washing ISIS’ budget with bitcoins.
FaceMaskCenter.com claimed to be offering FDA-approved N95 face masks as well as a wide variety of other PPE, adding Tyvek suits, gloves, glasses and thermometers. “FaceMaskCenter is the leading provider of online and first-of-its-kind non-public protective devices,” reads on the website, which now presents only one report of the seizure of the Department of Justice, the U.S. Treasury, and the Department of Homeland Security.
It’s not entirely transparent to what extent FaceMaskCenter was an absolute scam, or if you only sold low-quality PPE. The civil lawsuit opposed to FaceMaskCenter.com indicates that the mask to be offered on the site, for example, occurred through a Turkish company and did not meet FDA standards, as advertised. When an American visitor contacted FaceMaskCenter to ask them to purchase masks and other personal protective equipment for hospitals, nursing homes, and chimney departments, the Justice Department stated that a Syrian citizen based in Turkey had responded with an offer of up to 100,000 masks, a number described through the complaint as unrealistic given the scarcity of masking of the global pandemic. It is not known if any masks were actually delivered.
FaceMaskCenter also claimed to be led by “health experts” and founded in 1996, when in fact the domain had been registered by the end of February 2020, according to court documents. “There are a lot of other warning signs,” says Turner of DarkOwl. “You can only check from the date of domain creation if you are a valid provider compared to someone who is only looking to take advantage of the pandemic.”
In addition to the seizure of the EPI site, the Justice Department states that internal security investigations by the IRS, fbi and DHS have also disguised the financing operations of Al Qaeda and the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the Hamas militant wing. . According to a blog post through blockchain’s forensic Chainalysis company about the operation, agents confiscated a total of more than $1 million in cryptocurrencies, largely from an unlicensed cash company, allegedly through a Turkish guy named Mehmet Akti. Chainalysis also writes that Al Qaeda has also channeled its cryptocurrency donations, requested on the Web and telegram, through BitcoinTransfer, a bitcoin exchange founded in Idlib, Syria.
But ISIS appears to have been unique among the teams, at least based on the habit described in the indictment, employing a Covid-19 scam to raise funds, which only appeals to donations. The result is that desperate consumers in FaceMaskCenter.com may not have been forced to call for life-saving equipment, but possibly also have unknowingly contributed to violent extremism.