In their never ending effort to devise new schemes that defraud online banking accounts, criminals have come up with a scam that is both simple and extremely believable – they are promising online banking fraud protection insurance that is, well, fraudulent.


The recent attack Trusteer discovered uses the Tatanga malware platform. In the configuration file Trusteer captured, Tatanga notifies the online banking victim via a web browser injection that their bank is offering free insurance protection against online fraud.

The victim is then presented with a fake insurance account that claims to cover the total amount of funds in their bank account. This fake insurance account is actually a real bank account that belongs to a money mule. The victim is told that they will be protected against any losses from online fraud by this insurance coverage. In the final step, the victim is prompted to authorize a transaction that they believe is to activate the insurance coverage.

In all likelihood, the victim does not expect any funds will be transferred out of their account.

To approve the transaction the victim enters a one-time SMS password that is sent to their mobile device. Unfortunately, the victim is actually approving a transfer of funds from their account to the fraudster’s money mule account.

“Once they have compromised an endpoint, the ability of Tatanga and the other cybercrime platforms to commit online fraud is limited only by the imagination of criminals,” said Heyman. “As this latest scheme illustrates fraudsters do not lack creativity when it comes to developing new methods that trick victims into authorizing fraudulent transactions.”