Online Poker Funds Iraqi Insurgents
March 10, 2008
Next time you decide to sit down and play poker, watch out! You may be funding Iraqi Insurgents.
According to a recent article, Poker Players need to be very careful of what is running on their computers.
In the article, Mikko Hyppönen of F-Secure was interviewed about some of the potential dangers faced by online poker players.
Hyppönen outlined one situation where a high stakes poker player was sent a trojan by another player whom he regularly played against. “He was playing online poker against these people who were in another country, the guy could press a button and he would receive a screenshot of the target’s screen. So he sees the hold cards. If you’re playing poker and the other players know your cards, it’s pretty hard to win.
Since no money is directly being stolen, it is cleverly disguised.
Iraqi Insurgents Funded Through Poker
Near the end of the article, Hyppönen highlighted a recent situation where Tariq Al-Daour was sent to prison after he used online poker sites to launder millions of dollars to help fund insurgents fighting allied forces in Iraq.
Tariq Al-Daour was sent to prison with two of his friends after they used Windows Trojans to receive personal information from unsuspecting people. These trojans had keyloggers (keystroke loggers which record all the information you type on you keyboard) and waited until unsuspecting victims did their online shopping to obtain things like name, addresses and credit card numbers.
During their stint they managed to get over 36,000 credit card numbers. Once they had the cards they made accounts on online poker sites. They played against themselves (losing on purpose) then would use the winning account to cash out to an online payment processor.
They managed to accumulate roughly 2 Million Euros which they would then use at other online shops to buy things like tents, books, knives, GPS systems, radios and much more, all of which were sent over to insurgents in Iraq.
Comments
Got something to say?