A Fake Ransomware Gang Claims It Extorted $85K, Calls Themselves Criminal Geniuses
Last week, we reported on a threat actor group that claimed to have breached Epic Games and other high-profile organizations. With respect to Epic Games, the group, Mogilevich, claimed to have made off with 189GB of data, and it was up for sale through March 4th. However, when pressed for information on the stolen data, the group wanted proof of cash before giving anything up. Further, Epic Games released a statement that there was no indication that they had been breached, nor had the group reached out to them.
Given the curiosities, it appeared that the breach was not real and was, in fact, a sham, which has now been effectively confirmed. A spokesperson for the group told Cyber Daily, “In reality, we are not a ransomware-as-a-service, but professional fraudsters.” To boil it down, the group used high-profile names to gain visibility, which was leveraged to scam people who were looking to buy the data out of money, which purportedly netted them $85,000 in one instance. The spokesperson, Pongo, asked, “Why confess all this when we could just run away?” Pongo continues, saying “This was done to illustrate the process of our scam,” and that, “We don’t think of ourselves as hackers but rather as criminal geniuses, if you can call us that.”
This story should obviously be taken with a grain of salt, but it aligns more with previous events. The real twist would now be for the group to reappear and publish Epic Games data to prove it happened. However, we do not expect that to happen, given that the group’s website now appears offline.
