These vanilla visa cards are a scam. Can you just imagine how many millions of dollars they are. Pocketing by consumers getting angry and just throwing them in the trash!! The Department of Consumer. Affairs at 1100 4th Street sw #5211, Washington, DC 20024 should receive a letter from all of who have. Been scammed and demand an investigation. A Vanilla Visa card is a prepaid card, which means that you load money onto it when you purchase it. It is sold as a gift card, though there are several types of these Vanilla cards, and some work like reloadable debit cards as well. This article focuses on the gift card type, which is sold in denominations ranging from $10 to $250+.
For at least the third time in its existence, OGUsers — a forum overrun with people looking to buy, sell and trade access to compromised social media accounts — has been hacked.
An offer by the apparent hackers of OGUsers, offering to remove account information from the eventual database leak in exchange for payment.
Roughly a week ago, the OGUsers homepage was defaced with a message stating the forum’s user database had been compromised. The hack was acknowledged by the forum’s current administrator, who assured members that their passwords were protected with a password obfuscation technology that was extremely difficult to crack.
But unlike in previous breaches at OGUsers, the perpetrators of this latest incident have not yet released the forum database. In the meantime, someone has been taunting forum members, saying they can have their profiles and private messages removed from an impending database leak by paying between $50 and $100.
OGUsers was hacked at least twice previously, in May 2019 and again in March 2020. In the wake of both incidents, the compromised OGUsers databases were made available for public download.
The leaked databases have been useful in reconstructing who’s behind several high-profile incidents involving compromised social media accounts and virtual currency heists that leveraged SIM swapping, a crime that centers around convincing mobile phone company employees to transfer ownership of the target’s phone number to a device the attackers control.
For example, when several high-profile Twitter accounts were hacked in July 2020 and used to promote bitcoin scams, the profile and private message data from previous OGUser forum compromises proved invaluable in piecing together the “who” behind that scam.
The hacker handles featured in the defacement message left on OGUsers — “Chinese” and “Disco” — correspond to two nicknames used by banned OGUser members who have been trying to generate interest for their own forum that seeks to emulate OGUsers. Orinoco pc card drivers.
Disco, a.k.a “Discoli” a.k.a. “Disco Dog,” is a young man from the United Kingdom who has marketed an automated bot program and service advertised as a way for customers to “cash out” illicit access to OneVanilla Visa prepaid card accounts using PayPal. The same individual also earlier this year founded a corporation in the U.K. called Disco Payments.
Reached via Twitter, Discoli said he and his friends hacked OGUsers via an outdated plugin used by the site. But he claims they have no plans to sell the stolen user data, and said the company was registered as a joke.
“I had a sort of feud with the administrator in the past but this one was more for fun,” Discoli said. “Not too interested in doing damage by releasing database or anything like that.”
Vanilla Visa Gift Card Hacked 2018
As I noted the first time OGUsers got hacked, it’s difficult not to admit feeling a bit of schadenfreude in the continued exposure of a community that has largely specialized in hacking others. Or perhaps in the case of OGUsers, the sentiment may more aptly be described as “schadenfraud.”
To most people, un-activated gift cards hanging on a rack in a store are worthless. But to hackers, those cards are just cash waiting to be stolen.
Gift cards have weaker security measures than debt or credit cards, cyber researcher William Caput, tells Wired. The weak security features create a vulnerability, which makes the gift cards valuable to someone who knows how to exploit the security hole. With a little bit of hacking and craftsmanship, a fraudster can spend the money on someone's card before they do.
Caput tells Wired, in an article about his research, that gift cards are mass-produced with sets of card numbers that follow a simple pattern-- the first set of 10 numbers are identical, the eleventh and twelfth numbers count up from 01 to 99, and the last four digits are random. Wineskin for mac os catalina. Caput first discovered this vulnerability--an easy-to-follow pattern--two years ago when he was hired as a white hat hacker to penetration test a large restaurant chain.
With the numerical pattern, Caput says a hacker can check how much money is on specific cards by visiting the restaurant's or store's website. Caput says a hacker will need to use software that will enter each sequential combination to enter all 10,000 possibilities for the last four card numbers, but the hacker can cycle through card numbers and see how much money is on those cards that are activated.
Hackers can use the gift cards online or print fraudulent gift cards themselves by taking blank plastic cards and writing magnetized strips onto them with a machine that sells on Amazon.com, Caput says.
'You're basically stealing other people's cash through these cards,' Caput tells Wired. 'You take a small sample of gift cards from restaurants, department stores, movie theaters, even airlines, look at the pattern, determine the other cards that have been sold to customers and steal the value on them.'
Caput warned retailers about the security vulnerabilities. Many companies heeded his advice and added security features to their sites to prevent hackers from testing thousands of card numbers. But he says these changes still don't prevent someone from taking photos of un-activated card numbers at the store and waiting until someone activates them so they can steal the money. Indian train simulator 2018 free new update.
According to a report released this year by security firm Flashpoint, the number of criminals targeting gift cards has been trending up for the last two years. A vendor selling stolen gift cards on dark web marketplace AlphaBay made over $400,000 in sales in eight months, Flashpoint analyst Liv Rowley tells Wired. The vendor was selling cards from stores like Whole Foods and OfficeMax.
Vanilla Visa Gift Card Hacked Today
Although many retailers already fixed the vulnerabilities,Caput told Wired that a 'disturbing fraction' of retailers are still open to hacking. The fix, fortunately, is easy. Caput says retailers shouldn't leave un-activated cards out in the aisles and they should add tests to their e-commerce sites to prevent hacking software from checking thousands of card numbers for value. Caput also says retailers could add scratch-away covers to cards and require a PIN number to use the card.