“The simplest scam was using the stolen data as a source of victims. The alleged fraudsters would cold-call these people and pressure them to buy near-worthless shares. The price of these thinly traded securities would then rise, enabling the fraudsters (who bought them first) to make an easy profit. Mr Shalon, according to the indictment, told an accomplice that getting the customers of the hacked companies to buy the dodgy shares was ‘like drinking vodka in Russia’. Such ‘pump and dump’ scams are as old as securities exchanges themselves. But the internet enables criminals to carry out such crimes at a scale and speed never before seen. It also makes cross-border crime far easier. The alleged fraudsters used, among other computers, a server in Egypt, rented under a pseudonym, plus computers in South Africa and Brazil. They laundered money in Cyprus, and processed illegal credit-card payments in Azerbaijan.
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Source: What lies behind the JPMorgan Chase cyber-attack | The Economist