Scammers have virtual smartphones on speed dial for fraud

Smartphones have fast become the basis of our digital identities, securing payment systems and bank accounts. Now virtual devices that pretend to be real handsets have become a key tool for financial scammers, according to one company. 

Security vendor Group IB issued a report Wednesday into the misuse of ostensibly legitimate cloud phone platforms as tools for criminals to commit authorized push payment (APP) fraud. As with the social media abusers who came before them, fraudsters choose cloud phones because they appear to be totally legitimate devices if you don't know how to examine their telemetry. 

Traditional banks of actual smartphones are expensive and cumbersome to maintain. SIM farms, meanwhile, make use of so much emulation software to run ARM software on non-ARM hardware that they're easy to detect, as they don't give off data characteristic of actual smartphones.

Cloud phones, which run in virtual mobile infrastructure ...