Amazon and Apple’s iTunes Store Ripped Off
The news of the almost half a million dollar rip-off by a criminal gang which duped Amazon and the iTunes store was a glimpse of the growing sophistication high-tech internet criminal gangs operate today. The ploy had the gang creating their own music and then offering it on both sites for sale with none of them suspecting a thing wrong till they were told by the FBI’s eCrime force and Metro Law enforcement. The gang made off with $300,000 worth of royalties from the songs they sold on the sites, paid by them on seemingly legal grounds. What the online music stores didn’t even know is that they were being victimized by the gang’s members who purchased their own music online using stolen and cloned credit cards spanning the US and Europe.
The gang was noticed by the eCrimes task force last February and was smashed when they were shut down by the combined law enforcement units, who have found at least 1,500 stolen or cloned credit cards for their criminal activities. The success was due to diligent work by the US’s FBI and Scotland Yard which is filing charges of money laundering and conspiracy to commit fraud pending filing of formal charges in the respective courts.