USERS of Tencent QQ, a popular instant messaging service, are often preyed on by scam artists, who have created a complete QQ scam industry, with tens of thousands of people involved at various points in the chain, Shenzhen Evening News reported Wednesday.

    A typical scam reportedly includes four key procedures, with clear work divisions among people involved in the process, as in any organized crime operation. First, a ringleader organizes and plans the scam, then thieves steal QQ account information; hackers are hired to steal money people have deposited into their QQ accounts and, finally, yet another person is hired to withdraw the money from the bank.

    Trojan viruses, often indetectable malware programs containing malicious codes that, when executed, carry out actions such as loss or theft of data — are a frequent means of exploitation employed in stealing money from QQ accounts.

    A senior software engineer told Shenzhen Evening News that Trojan viruses can be purchased for 300 yuan (US$49) and users have good things to say about their effectiveness in enabling theft. Some websites even provide free downloads for Trojan viruses, the software engineer said.

    The developer of QQ, Shenzhen-based Tencent, said there are certain people who are in charge of offering Trojan viruses to scamming rings and training their members to use the programs.

    Professional hackers write the viruses and disguise them, often with deceitful links to websites containing a virus, thus baiting people to download them, at which point they can virtually enter their computers to steal information.

    Most scam rings choose to buy stolen QQ accounts on the black market. These QQ accounts are usually traded in “envelopes” and each envelope contains a certain number of QQ accounts (anywhere from 1,000 to 10 million). A stolen QQ account is generally sold for 1.5 yuan.

    The stolen account trade also breeds another industry.

    A report on the Internet’s black market concerning stolen QQ accounts said that every day, 10 million envelopes containing stolen QQ accounts are sold on the black market.

    The process begins with a ringleader, who purchases Trojan programs from programmers and puts them on Web pages with the assistance of network professionals. Internet users who click on a Web page that contains a Trojan virus subsequently have their computers infected by the virus, leading to QQ account theft.

    The stolen QQ accounts will then be sold in bulk by the ringleader to lower-tier distributors, who will then sort them into different groups according to their uses. The going rate for 10,000 QQ accounts ranges from 1,000 to 1,500 yuan.

    With a proxy IP address, a perpetrator can secretly log on to a stolen QQ account and read friends’ information via the user’s chat records and QQ emails before they lock on to a target to carry out the scam.

    Tencent said financial staffers and students who study overseas are two kinds of QQ users that are frequently targeted. Perpetrators who have stolen QQ accounts of overseas students often ask for money from parents, pretending to be the children.

    In the latest scam, an accountant of a manufacturer in Humen, Dongguan City, was bilked 450,000 yuan by a scammer who had stolen the accountant’s QQ account information.

    Despite the scams’ rampant nature, it’s difficult for police to track down the perpetrators because they are very careful not to leave any clues.

    (Zhao Jie)