European police have arrested six people as part of an investigation into a theft which saw €24 million (US $27 million) stolen from users of cryptocurrency exchange.

In a press release, Europol described how five men and one woman were simultaneously arrested on Tuesday morning at the homes of the suspects in Charlcombe, Lower Weston and Staverton (UK) and Amsterdam and Rotterdam (the Netherlands).

A larger number of electronic devices and equipment were seized at the homes of those arrested, and will now be examined by the UK’s South West Regional Cyber Crime Unit (SW RCCU).

Those apprehended in the UK were arrested on suspicion of committing computer misuse and money laundering offences, while their Dutch counterparts – including a 19-year-old woman in Amsterdam – have been arrested on suspicion of money laundering.

Full details of how the alleged hackers are supposed to have stolen funds from cryptocurrency investors have not been shared, but Europol’s press release says that the investigation related to typosquatting.

Typosquatting sees scammers create webpages that fool you into believing they are legitimate by having almost legitimate URLs. If a user is careless or in a hurry it’s all too easy to not notice that you are on a site called example.om rather than example.com, for instance.

For many years criminals, scammers and opportunists have taken advantage of mistyped URLs to create convincing-looking sites that attempt to steal login credentials or install malware. In response, some popular websites have purchased domains that might otherwise be used to fool their users (Twitter, for instance, owns twiter.com and redirects traffic there to the legitimate twitter.com site), but it’s not really practical to handle all the possible permutations.

If the police claims are correct, it sounds as if criminals created a spoof version (Read more...)