A scientific study prepared by Naif Arab University for Security Sciences (NAUSS), in cooperation with the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), reveals the crime rates of online financial fraud targeting the Arab countries. It indicates that financial fraud includes five criminal patterns which are most frequent on the Arab level. Such criminal patterns employ 24 criminal behaviors for attacking the victims.
The study entitled “The Role of Financial Institutions in Reducing Cybercrimes", issued in early January 2022, demonstrates that the readiness of competent authorities to encounter the online financial crimes greatly differs from one authority to another. These differences are associated with the online reports mechanisms that may be available to victims of online fraud. By analyzing 503 fraudulent advertisements, the study shows that the daily visits of these fraudulent websites by the potential victims are more than 137 thousand visits. There are 5 fraudulent types associated with investments, business emails, romantic fraud through text messages, and sexual extortion.
The study aiming to define the criminal tools, methods, and tactics employed by the fraudsters and to highlight the mechanism they use for tricking the victims shows a complicated criminal technique designed for targeting the victims for two times by two different ways. The first one attracts the victims through advertisements on fraudulent investment for paving the way for using the second way represented by advertisements on legal consultations enterprises claiming their ability to recover the assets.
The findings related to fraudulent advertisement analysis affirm that fraudsters publish their advertisements on famous and trusted websites by advertising agents. Moreover, the fraudsters exploit the online advertisements forms of online advertising agents by benefitting from the artificial intelligence techniques of advertising enterprises for attracting the potential victims.
The study highlights the top five fraudulent domains that published about 40 thousand advertising links by exploiting the technique of domain name registration. 93% of the fraudulent domains have been registered in the generic top-level domains (gTLDs), while 7% of the fraudulent domains have been registered in the country code top-level domains (ccTLDs).
The study complies with NAUSS's strategy 2019-2023 that focuses on the applied research prepared by the Center of Cybercrimes and Digital Forensics established at NAUSS in 2021. The Center strives to be the pioneering Arab reference in qualifying the Arab competencies in cybercrimes and digital forensics. It supports and prepares the research, develops the academic and training programs, and provides consultations and qualitative awareness services for community.
It is worth mentioning that NAUSS, the scientific body of the Arab Interior Ministers Council (AIMC), pays its attention to the qualification and development of the Arab competencies specialized in combating the financial crimes and frauds. It offers academic, training, and research programs in cooperation with many concerned international institutions. Accordingly, NAUSS introduces, in cooperation with Case Western Reserve University in the United States of America, the Master of Arts Program in Financial Integrity. This academic program includes courses for advancing the knowledge and strengthening the capabilities and skills required for adhering to and complying with laws of financial crimes fighting. It also identifies the methodology adopted for evaluating the commitment to laws and monitoring the suspicious financial activities.