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Traditional financial crime and cyberattacks are converging, requiring new skills and approaches to the problem, officials said. The U.S. Secret Service has created the Cyber Fraud Task Forces (CFTFs), aimed at preventing, detecting and mitigating complex cyber-enabled financial crime – including making arrests and convictions. The CFTF is the result of a formal merging of two of the Secret Service’s existing units into a single unified network. The Electronic Crimes Task Forces (ECTFs) and the Financial Crimes Task Forces (FCTFs), the division said in a recent media statement. The driver for the move is the fact that online cybercrime and financial fraud have converged to the point that it’s impossible to address one without including the other, it said. In fact, nearly all of the Secret Service’s traditional financial crime investigations make use of digital evidence, and the group acknowledged that increasing technological sophistication on the part of bad actors has led to a proliferation of blended cyber-enabled financial crimes. Those include business email compromise (BECs) scams, ransomware attacks, data breaches and the sale of stolen credit cards and personal information on the internet. Keith McCammon, chief security officer and co-founder of Red Canary said that an overwhelming majority of threat actors are financially motivated. The Secret Service also said that it has broken up “hundreds” of COVID19-related cyber-fraud scams since March, when coronavirus lockdowns went into place around the country. It thus has prevented tens of millions of dollars in fraud from occurring, officials said. In terms of specific wins, the Secret Service has halted the illicit sales of online stolen COVID-19 test kits, and is now leading a “nationwide effort to investigate and counter a vast transnational unemployment fraud scheme targeting the U.S. state unemployment programs,” according to the Secret Service. The Secret Service has 42 domestic CFTF locations with two international locations, in London and Rome. The law-enforcement group said that it plans to further extend the CFTF network to include as many as 160 offices across the country and around the globe. Via threatpost.com