[ISN] Bulgarian Hackers Tangled in Tax Evasion Scams

From: InfoSec News <alerts_at_private>
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2010 00:30:09 -0500 (CDT)
http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=117423

Novinite.com
June 23, 2010

Computer hackers in Bulgaria help retailers hide their revenues and 
deprive the State budget of millions in Value Added Tax (VAT), the 
Bulgarian daily Standard writes.

The police and the National Revenue Agency (NRA) are probing computer 
wizs, who were able to break the code of cash registers and manipulate 
their memory. For a monthly fee from merchants, the hackers can delete a 
number of transactions or reduce by 10% - 20% the value of each sale.

The scam is difficult to prove since when the revenue agents and the 
police make a surprise visit, they find the cash register functioning 
while a check would not show days and hours without registered sales..

The scam is common in big cities, the police say, because stores there 
have larger turnover. In order to deal with the crime, the revenue 
agents also use innovative methods such as making purchases from the 
same store in the course of several days and keeping their receipts. The 
probe is done a month later and the receipts are compared against the 
memory of the register. If the purchase had been deleted, NRA begins a 
full audit of the retailer.


_________________________________________________________________
Attend Black Hat USA 2010, hosted at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada
July 24-29th, offering over 60 training sessions and 11 tracks of Briefings
from security industry elite. To sign up visit http://www.blackhat.com
Received on Wed Jun 23 2010 - 22:30:09 PDT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Wed Jun 23 2010 - 22:34:02 PDT