Money Transfer Fraud
Protect yourself from Money Transfer Fraud
This increasingly common scam targets your business and can cause significant financial loss. Criminals use this scam to trick employees into electronically transferring large sums of money to fraudulent accounts. Variations of this scam include:
Criminals compromise or imitate the email account of a manager or employee of the company.
The criminals use this hijacked or imitated email account to direct staff to wire transfer money to an unknowingly fraudulent account.
Creating fraudulent invoices that appear to be from your business’ usual and legitimate vendors/suppliers.
These fake invoice requests will ask for the wire transfer payment to be sent to an alternative account which actually belongs to the criminals.
Actions you can take:
Require all staff to verbally confirm all wire transfer requests.
Encourage this practice even if the request appears to originate from a higher-level staff member or manager.
Confirm anything suspicious.
Call vendors and suppliers to confirm the legitimacy of invoices that require payment by wire transfer, especially if a new account number is requested. Make sure staff call the phone number from your file, not from the invoice provided.