The APWG Counter Muling Project brings together consumer advocates, technologists, behaviorists, financial institutions, ecommerce companies and law enforcement agencies to develop consumer education programming that can be broadly (i.e. across different industries, nationalities and languages) deployed to stymie muling's growth by preventing consumers from being duped into acting as unwitting cyber accomplices and muling money for organized ecrime gangs.

Muling has increasingly drawn ordinary consumers, especially job seekers, into the employ of organizied ecrime enterprises specifically to facilitate the movement of cash and bearer instruments such as money orders to deliver liquid assets to phishing gangs that have completed a successful phishing campaign or identity theft scam and want to extract value from the accounts and credit lines they have co-opted.

By inducting ordinary consumers into their scheme, the organized ecrime rings are able to complete their crimes, moving cash and bearer instruments across the international frontiers that, for the nonce, complicate the efforts of law enforcement to pursue. At the same time, they place persons they regard as a disposible asset directly in the path of law enforcement personnel investigating these ecrimes who will find them accountable for laundering money stolen from accounts co-opted in phishing schemes and identity theft scams.

The APWG Counter Muling Project development team is now developing a series of video podcasts for distribution among our member companies and agencies, research partners, government agencies, trade and law enforcement associations and traditional electronic media. The team envisions a number of electronic educational instruments to be developed over time, to be delivered in broad media campaigns in a just-in-time modality like the APWG/CMU Phishing Education Landing Page Program which delivers counter-phsihing instruction to consumers who have clicked on links in phishing emails.

If you would like to learn more about this initiative, please contact us. 

Peter Cassidy - pcassidy@antiphishing.org

Secretary General 

APWG