thewayne | A couple of new financial scams

First up, real estate and title companies are getting hit, it sounds like malware performing a man in the middle attack. Clients who are transferring earnest money electronically where the destination bank info to where the money is being sent is changed, and said earnest money is being sent directly to the criminals: do not pass go, crooks collect $20,000. The key to preventing this would be to get the money guy to send the bank information via hard copy, take said hard copy to your bank, then have them verify the target account before transmitting.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/04/phishers-divert-home-loan-earnest-money/

Next up: I've written about fraudulently-filed tax returns before. Well, it's hit doctors and clinicians pretty bad, several hundred have had their returns usurped. It looks like a big data aggregater was probably compromised, resulting in the lose of a lot of professional's information, probably someone on par with the American Medical Association, not that I'm saying it's the AMA, I don't see the AMA collecting things like SSNs and dependent info. Could have been some state boards that were hit, or maybe lots of clinics are using the same clinic management software and they got compromised at the vendor level. Time will tell what happened.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/04/states-spike-in-tax-fraud-against-doctors/