Scam Alert: Hacked emails give rise to fraudulent wire transfers

Another scam making the rounds at the moment involves hacked emails from companies or banks and sometimes involves the theft of hundreds of thousand of dollars. In today’s Monroe Police Report on Your Local News, just such a scheme was perpetrated against Elite Storage in Monroe resulting in the misappropriation of $210,000.

According to the police report, the company was scammed into wiring the money to the bank account of a vendor who claimed they had not received payment for an amount that totaled three invoices. However, on checking it was discovered that the scammer had hacked the vendor’s email account, got the information and managed to scam the company into wiring the money to a bank account that had been set up at Trust Bank in Charlotte, NC. The actual vendor had already received the payment. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating the fraud, but it is allegedly a global scam that many companies are now dealing with.

In May this year, Westfield and Fairfield County Journals put out a warning of this scam to companies that issue wire transfers from their accounts after potential breaches of their email communications. Click or tap on this link for details on how the scam is perpetrated and how to protect yourself from being vulnerable to such a scam.

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