US Law Enforcement Agency Prevents Fraud With KELA’s Cyber Intelligence Platform

As part of automated attack surface monitoring for a US law enforcement agency, KELA’s platform detected an image of a check in a fraud-dedicated Telegram group. The check had been written by a police officer to the agency’s pension fund, and because every name iteration of the agency was set as a monitored asset, KELA’s text extraction picked it up.

A police officer’s banking details in the hands of cybercriminals could be sold to forgers or monetized in the underground. The agency was alerted immediately, contacted the officer and remediated the threat, and informed the US Postal Service, which issued a public warning about dropping checks in street mailboxes.

Key results:

• A stolen check with an officer’s bank details detected inside an image on Telegram
• Automatic notification that let the agency act before the check was forged or sold
• The officer identified and the threat remediated, preventing fraud and identity theft
• Monitoring of every name iteration of the agency as an organizational asset
• A public USPS warning triggered by the case, protecting others from the same scheme