Just as we anticipated earlier this year in our “How mobile spammers verify the validity of harvested phone number” post, mobile spammers and cybercriminals in general will continue ensuring that QA (Quality Assurance) is applied to their upcoming campaigns. This is done in an attempt to both successfully reach a wider audience and to charge a higher price for a verified database of mobile numbers.
In this post I’ll profile yet another commercially available phone/mobile number verification tool that’s exclusively supporting Huawei 3G USB modems.
More details:
Sample screeshot of the phone/mobile number 3G USB modem based verification tool:
Second screeshot of the phone/mobile number 3G USB modem based verification tool:
The phone/mobile number verification tool supports an unlimited number of Huawei 3G USB modems, can hide the Caller ID, can play any kind of sound file to a dialed number, and can also send SMS messages to any of the tested numbers. The price? 2000 rubles ($64.46).
Despite the fact that the tool allows the cybercriminal to send multiple types of SMS messages to a prospective victim, this wouldn’t prove to be a cost-effective solution for mass SMS-ing tens of thousands of users, unless of course the credit on the SIM cards has been obtained through fraudulent means. In this case, what would be the market trending tactic of choice for cybercriminals? It’s outsourcing to a vendor of managed SMS spam services, which would result in a higher quality standard applied to the campaign, as well as a cost-effective alternative for the them to take advantage of due to the achieved ‘malicious economies of scale’ on behalf of the vendor.
We’ll continue monitoring this market segment, and post updates as soon as new services emerge.
You can find more about Dancho Danchev at his LinkedIn Profile. You can also follow him on Twitter.
