Scammers are using fake mug shots as part of an elaborate campaign to steal identities from unsuspecting individuals, the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned.
The campaign appears to be pretty simple and is similar to a blackmail operation. While surfing the Web, people come across images that appear to be mug shots of themselves posted on various Websites, according to an item posted on Scam Alert posted by the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) on Wednesday.
When the victims contacted the Website owners to have their photos removed, the site operators demanded to see copies of their driver’s licenses and other pieces of personal information. In some cases, the victims had to send over copies of their court records. They frequently were told there was a fee for removing the images.
Providing the information put the victims “at risk for identity theft,” and IC3 has received “hundreds of complaints” about this scam, according to the alert.
In many cases, even after paying the fee, some pictures were not removed. In other cases, they were taken off one site and posted to another one, forcing the victims to go through the entire process and pay a new fee all over again.
If the victims threatened to report the sites for unlawful practices, the site operators “threated to escalate the damaging information against the victims,” IC3 said. Victims of this scam should file a complaint at IC3’s website, www.ic3.gov.
The mug shots themselves were frequently faked, with incorrect or blatantly false information posted. Some individuals said they’d been juveniles at the time of the arrest and their records should be sealed and not available to the public.
The weekly scam alert from IC3 included information about a malware campaign infecting Skype users in Latin America with the Liftoh Trojan via shortened URLs sent via instant messages and a phone scam masquerading as a remote tech support call from a wire transfer company. The scammers gained access to victim accounts by remotely logging into the computer as part of the tech support call and transferred funds, according to the alert.