Friday beers scam up 240 percent, inflicts $1.2 billion in damages Fake email supplier scams are booming and have inflicted $1.2 billion in damages to businesses globally in the past year according to the FBI. The scams formally known as "business email compromise" involved a fraudster compromising the email account of an existing supplier and attempting to steal funds by tricking staff into …
It's probably on his business card, I know my work email address is on mine. Plenty of opportunity to pick up such things at shows and conferences, or even a bin somewhere. Lots of places have an easily-guessable email address format so once you've got the names (which are not hard to find on-line in public records), you can crack it.
Nope.
It only has to work once in a million emails - possibly even less. Email is incredibly cheap to send - they can send a million every Friday for practically nowt and if just one business falls for it, the scammers still win.
What's needed is for the victims to come forward (I suspect most don't) and press wire-fraud charges.
We get many of these scam attempts every week, even including phone call ones - I've had a lot myself, though being a mere pleb they're barking up the wrong tree to begin with.
Well quite. We don't pay any invoice without first matching it to a PO which in turn relates to a cost centre and budget code.
You'd have to have a very sloppy finance function to fall for this, so we'll just call it an incompetence tax which will probably be worth paying for the lesson.
The earlier version of the scam was just invoicing plausible amounts for plausible things like printer consumables, so it's some kind of progress now they have to fake senior staff behavior. Once the scammers get really good they can apply for the C-suite jobs too if they content themselves with ratifying the till rather than strategizing and nepotism then they may well be an improvement...
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