POLICE POUNCE ON ALLEGED CYBER CROOK

Wow! The length that some people will go to in order to depives some poor hardworking individual of his hard earned scheckles and having said that - how incredibly easy it turned out to be in the long run!

It makes me wonder, even with all of the FICA Acts and all the rest of it, these people still managed to penetrate the banks firewalls and security. So at the end of the day - what's the point!

Perhaps it is time that the banks start having to prove to us that they can take care of our sensitive and confidential information, not to mention, our hard earned moola!

Police pounce on alleged cyber crook
Lee Rondganger

October 26 2006 at 04:35AM

A 3G card, a laptop and a cellphone. This was all a South African man needed to allegedly run an international online banking fraud syndicate from his Cape Town flat, where he is believed to have siphoned millions of dollars from people's bank accounts. But it was the very same laptop and cellphone that led a multi-agency force - including the Scorpions, Standard Bank and a British security consultancy firm - to 28-year-old Abdul Malik Parker's flat in Tygervalley, Cape Town, where he was arrested.

Parker has since been linked to 120 incidents of online fraud affecting clients of all of South Africa's major banks. Hundreds of international banking clients in the UK, France, Sweden and Australia have also allegedly fallen victim to the syndicate.

Parker, who is said to be the head of the African operation for the syndicate, was arrested on October 6 by the Scorpions. They raided his flat by tracking the signal on his 3G data card. He has been described as a "high flyer" who wears expensive clothes, drives the latest Mercedes-Benz and owns a R700 000 flat on the Cape Town Waterfront.

'This is a major breakthrough for us'

Parker also has two previous convictions, one of diamond smuggling and another of fraud. When he was arrested, he was found with R20 000 in cash. He appeared in court on October 9 and was released on R20 000 bail. He is currently under house arrest. This is the first time that a person has been arrested in South Africa for allegedly defrauding multiple banks by using the Internet. Authorities are hailing the arrest as a major breakthrough in cyber crime and say they are now closing in on the other members of the international syndicate. Advocate Gerhard Nel, head of the Scorpions in Gauteng, said the elite crime-busting unit was now going after syndicate members based in eastern Europe, the US and Russia. "This is a major breakthrough for us, but we really need to get the other big role-players. We will be tracking them to wherever they are hiding in the world," he said.

The arrest has been the culmination of six months of investigation, which started after a Standard Bank client reported that money had been transferred from his account to another without his knowledge. According to the bank, the client had apparently used an Internet cafe in Pretoria where hackers used PC spyware to steal his login details, card number and pin number. The bank then got its Internet security team to determine how the client's details had been compromised. It found his details had, in fact, been passed on to a computer server in Estonia in northern Europe. It was then able to gain access to the Estonia server, where it found hundreds of people's bank account details, including those of South Africans. Most of the South Africans whose details the syndicate had captured had used Internet cafes in Joburg North, Pretoria and Cape Town. Parker is alleged to have been able to gain access to the server in Estonia, where the syndicate provided him with the people's banking details. He would then use this information to allegedly log into their accounts and transfer money from there to various local accounts. Parker allegedly transferred some of the money to another syndicate member in St Petersburg, Russia. "When we realised what was going on we decided to get the Scorpions involved," said Herman Singh, director of architecture and technology engineering at Standard Bank."We also decided to call the other banks and warn them that we had found their clients' details on the Estonian server," he said.

Singh, together with his colleague Pat Pather, who is head of IT security at the bank, got an expert from the South African National Defence Force who deals with electronic warfare to also help them crack the case. As the investigation unfolded, they realised that a Vodacom 3G data card was used to operate the scam. The cellphone company helped them pinpoint the area in which the user was operating. On October 3 the team flew to Cape Town and, using the technology supplied by the UK firm, started tracing the suspect. "In three days, we drove 1 000km in the Cape Town CBD trying to find him. But on the 6th (of October) he logged on to his computer and we were able to trace him right to the front door of his flat," Pather said. When they arrested Parker, in addition to his laptop, investigators found three cellphones and 20 Sim cards in his flat. Parker is said to be fully co-operating with the Scorpions in the investigation. Standard Bank estimates that had Parker not been arrested, the syndicate could have siphoned more than R100-million from people's bank accounts.

This article was originally published on page 1 of Pretoria News on October 26, 2006