SOURCE: USA Today

(San Francisco, CA) — Bots, the millions of compromised computers remotely controlled by crooks, are doing more than spreading spam and phishing. Increasingly, they're agents for various forms of fraud, such as money laundering.

Over the past five months, RSA senior researcher Uriel Maimon has witnessed a spike in the use of bots on gaming sites to move money overseas.

An estimated $200,000 to $300,000 has been moved monthly — a reflection of a crackdown on online gambling in the U.S. after the passage of a federal law in October.

"Bot nets are the BlackBerrys of the fraud world," says Maimon. "You can't do anything without them." According to Maimon, one-in-20 to one-in-50 PCs worldwide are bots. A year ago, it was one-in-200 to one-in-500.

Here's how the gambling scam typically works: A fraudster steals a batch of credit card numbers and, for each number, opens an account in an online payment processing service for the purpose of gambling.

At the same time, the fraudster opens accounts on an online payment-processing service with credit cards with minimal cash balances — either under their name or that of an accomplice. The cybercrook goes to such lengths because they want to move the money of the victims, who are usually in the U.S., to accounts overseas, where they are located. The banks in these countries have less stringent banking laws and accept the transfer from the U.S.

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