Nigerian scam is a popular form of fraud in which the fraudster tricks the victim into paying a certain amount of money under the promise of a future, larger payoff.
Using a public dataset, in this paper we study how these forms of scam campaigns are organized and evolve over time. In particular, we discuss the role of phone numbers
as important identifiers to group messages together and depict the way scammers operate their campaigns. In fact, since the victim has to be able to contact the criminal, both email addresses and phone numbers need to be authentic and they are often unchanged and re-used for a long period of time. We also present in details several examples of Nigerian scam campaigns, some of which last for several years - representing them in a graphical way
and discussing their characteristics.
Inside the SCAM jungle: A closer look at 419 scam email operations
IWCC 2013, International Workshop on Cyber Crime (co-located with the 34th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P 2013), May 24, 2013, San Francisco, CA, USA
Type:
Conference
City:
San Francisco
Date:
2013-05-24
Department:
Digital Security
Eurecom Ref:
3955
Copyright:
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PERMALINK : https://www.eurecom.fr/publication/3955
