Phishing mule caught on CCTV escapes jail

Graham Cluley
Graham Cluley
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A man who helped steal €12,000 from Irish bank accounts through a phishing email campaign has managed to avoid being sent to jail.

Dublin Circuit Criminal Court imposed a three year suspended sentence on 38-year-old Eghosa Aigbe after he was found guilty of transferring €12,000 from a woman’s Bank of Ireland account without authorisation in August 2006.

When staff at the Kilkenny Bank of Ireland contacted their customer she confirmed that she had not transferred the money, but had recently responded to a bogus phishing email purporting to be from her bank, which had asked her to verify her account details.

Aigbe was identified by police from CCTV footage of him at another branch of Bank of Ireland, opening an account in the false name of Nosa Peter.

What’s particularly interesting about this case is that police agreed with Aigbe’s defence team that he was not aware of the phishing email, and was not its creator.

In other words, Aigbe was a money mule – used by a…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.