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The COVID-19 pandemic, and millions of others desperate for infrequent protective devices such as Tyvek masks and suits, have been a boon to scammers. 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 this week, 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 terrorist operations. Prosecutors say cryptographic assets confiscated through the equipment, which come with ISIS, the al-Qassam Brigades and al-Qaeda, constitute “the largest seizure of cryptocurrencies ever carried out by the 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, among the jihadist fundraising efforts that the Justice Department has rejected, one of them stands out for being brat. Court documents [PDF] detail how an ISIS agent allegedly executed 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 Turnage, executive leader of DarkOwl, a security company that has been tracking COVID-19 scams online for months. “We’ve noticed a large volume of illegitimate fabrics like PPE sold and never delivered,” Turnage says. “The fact that ISIS has made the decision to also enter this area 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 that he pleaded guilty to terrorism in 2018 after washing ISIS’ budget with bitcoins.
FaceMaskCenter.com claimed to be offering FDA-approved N95 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 a U.S. visitor Contacted FaceMaskCenter to ask them to purchase masks and other PPE 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 was founded in 1996, when in fact the domain had been registered by the end of February 2020, according to court documents. “There are many other warning signs,” Says DarkOwl’s Turnage. “You can check from the date of domain creation if you are a valid provider compared to someone who is only looking to capitalize on the pandemic.”
In addition to the seizure of the EPI site, the Justice Department states that the IRS Internal Security Investigations Unit, FBI and DHS has also disguised the investment operations of al-Qaeda and the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the Hamas militant wing. According to a blog post through blockchain forensic analysis company Chainalysis about the operation, agents seized a total of more than $1 million in cryptocurrencies, largely from an unlicensed cash company, allegedly through a Turkish type called 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 caught in the indictment, employing a COVID-19 scam to raise funds, which only requests for donations. The result is that desperate consumers in FaceMaskCenter.com may not have been forced to call for life-saving equipment, but would possibly also have unknowingly contributed to violent extremism.
This story made the first impression in wired.com.
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