A new report by Google and the University of California, San Diego shows that individuals looking to hire hackers that will compromise specific user accounts for them, may end up getting scammed themselves.
Using fake online identities, the researchers reached out to 27 “account hacking service providers” and asked if they could attack certain Gmail accounts. The accounts in question were honeypots that enabled the researches to closely monitor the activity during an attack. However, a mere 5 of the 27 hacker-for-hire services actually ended up attacking the specified accounts. 10 hackers never replied at all, 9 informed the researchers they no longer provided the requested service, and the remaining 3 seemed to be scam operations.
Prices for Gmail hacking services have exploded in the last few years, from an average $125 per account in 2017 to about $400 per account today. All of the advertised hacking services claimed to launch manual attacks only.
Read more: Google research: Most hacker-for-hire services are frauds
