A 65-year-old man was found guilty of conspiracy to commit money laundering because of his involvement in a complex email fraud scheme. Kenety Kim, also known as “Myung Kim”, pleaded guilty to these crimes on June 2; the defendant received a sentence of 108 months in prison, and must pay compensation of more than $745,000 USD.
During the hearing one of the witnesses described the financial and image damage his company received due to the defendant’s actions, as well as affecting his workers, specifying that Kim employed a variant of the attack known as “business email compromise” (BEC).
“This practice is a widespread threat and one of the cybercrimes that generate the most losses,” said Perrye Turner, a special prosecutor responsible for the case. After considerable time carrying out these practices, one of the affected companies notified the FBI, leading to Kim’s arrest.
The defendant was one of the main operators of a fraudulent scheme in which threat actors created fake business email addresses that they would later use to mislead victims and obtain bank transfers improperly. Kim created a fake account of suppliers from various companies and used it to convince multiple firms to send more than $300,000 to an alleged supplier. Actually, the account was created for a different ghost company that Kim created under a similar name. The defendant took the money obtained and eventually placed it in an account abroad.
Witnesses in the case also talked about multiple credit card frauds perpetrated by Kim. To do this, the defendant created a credit card payment processing system in order to obtain personal information from some victims, generating losses of about $10,000. At the time of his arrest, Kim was in possession of 36 credit cards in the name of different people, as well as 4 social security numbers, dates of birth and addresses of potential victims. In total, the defendant would have fraudulently obtained nearly $700,000.
Kim has been and will remain in custody pending his transfer to a U.S. Bureau of Prison facility.
He is a well-known expert in mobile security and malware analysis. He studied Computer Science at NYU and started working as a cyber security analyst in 2003. He is actively working as an anti-malware expert. He also worked for security companies like Kaspersky Lab. His everyday job includes researching about new malware and cyber security incidents. Also he has deep level of knowledge in mobile security and mobile vulnerabilities.
