Rohit Jawa fools officer into revealing personal details. Police officers investigating an eBay scammer must have been very surprised when the criminal, in a bold act of courage, stole their identities to make further fraudulent purchases.
Rohit Jawa, 25, Cincinnati, Ohio, was arrested on June 15, 2015, after running an online scam using eBay and PayPal accounts to defraud eBay customers and eBay’s third-party package insurance partner.
Jawa started operations in January 2013, and has recently pleaded guilty to eight counts of wire fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft. He now faces between 2 and 20 years in prison.
Jawa defrauded eBay customers and eBay’s ShipCover program
According to court documents, Mr. Jawa employed 19 eBay accounts and 18 PayPal accounts to initiate fraudulent purchases.
Using a series of switched addresses and sometimes sending out empty boxes, the 25-year-old Jawa defrauded eBay’s ShipCover program, by making hundreds of fake claims.
By December 2013, ShipCover employees caught on to the scheme and made a complaint to authorities, which then put a US Postal Service Office of Inspector General (USPS-OIG) officer on the case.
The USPS-OIG investigator managed to track down Jawa’s activities to a set of Yahoo and 1&1 Mail and Media Inc. email accounts.
Jawa stole the identity of his investigator
At one point during the early stages of the investigation, the officer got in contact with Jawa via one of the fake email addresses. Jawa posed as an innocent victim and asked the officer to send a copy of his credentials so he could prove he’s on an official investigation. The officer complied, and sent him the data.
Jawa used this information to create an account on the leo.gov (Law Enforcement Online portal) and then contacted the FBI for technical support to have the account validated.
Using the leo.gov email address, Jawa corresponded with other agents, and eventually got access to the personal details of other 9 officers. He later used this information to make more fraudulent purchases.
After agents traced Jawa to his email accounts, officers obtained a warrant, got IP and other data from 1 & 1 Mail and Media, and eventually arrested the scammer.
After pleading guilty, Mr. Jawa’s prison sentence will be decided on by a judge on February 12, 2016.
Source:https://news.softpedia.com/
Working as a cyber security solutions architect, Alisa focuses on application and network security. Before joining us she held a cyber security researcher positions within a variety of cyber security start-ups. She also experience in different industry domains like finance, healthcare and consumer products.
