Fraud - a bit strange

[roofer]

We had exactly this happen to us, but with a London Council to the tune of 400k.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ir...

Cheeky sods had reproduced our paper and just wrote informing council finance dept of our new account details.

We got our money, not sure the council recovered theirs though.

[kowalski655]

The article says they did. Wonder who would have got the promotion /golden handshake if they didn't?

[northandy]

hairyben said:

is it indeed? I've not heard of it before now and it's something that should concern me (tradie); sounds quite insidious, as I guess it'd involve biding ones time after hacking the account for the right opportunity to present itself.

Yes it's become a lot more frequent now, our finance team will no longer process bank details changes on supplier and employees without calling and verifying the change is legitimate. Even changes of bank details where they are printed on the actual invoice follow the same process.

[Chrisgr31]

Its presumably also possible that it is the householders email that has been hacked, and the email sent with a false header making it look as if it came from the builder?

[marshalla]

Chrisgr31 said:

Its presumably also possible that it is the householders email that has been hacked, and the email sent with a false header making it look as if it came from the builder?

Possible - but not as rewarding for the scammer.

I had to clean up a local business recently - every single PC in the office was infested with malware which allowed the crims. to monitor what they were doing. Within minutes of an invoice being generated another email was sent to the client to correct the "error" in bank account details. The crims. were watching their every move and grabbing the passwords for the email accounts every time they were changed too.

[speedking31]

btcc123 said:

What ever happened to cash in hand.

Bloke turns up at the house. Says "I'm the builder's brother and I've come to collect the cash." Customer hands over money. Turns out it wasn't the builder's brother. It's the same scenario. You would carry out due diligence to ensure the identity of the new recipient of the payment. How is it the builder's fault?

[EskimoArapaho]

FWIW, at least one of my accounts has added an extra step: whenever you add a new payee, you must wait an hour or more before you can send any money to them. I presume that during this time the destination account number is checked against a known list of dodgy accounts.

Still won't catch any newly hacked accounts, of course.

[R8VXF]

Nearly happened to a multinational company I know of to the tune of 10's of millions. Luckily payment was stopped in time!

Another multinational company had their details changed at companies house and massive orders and phone contracts setup in their name! I think it was Vodafone who alerted the company in question to the new large corporate contract!

[bobtail4x4]

speedking31 said:

loke turns up at the house. Says "I'm the builder's brother and I've come to collect the cash." Customer hands over money. Turns out it wasn't the builder's brother. It's the same scenario. You would carry out due diligence to ensure the identity of the new recipient of the payment. How is it the builder's fault?

happened to a local builder, bloke clained to be the boss, he asked for £2k the job was £3500, told them the "workers" were pulling a fast one, they gave him the £2k and phoned trading standards to report the "lads" ripping them off, police turned up at builders house for fraud.

[JonV8V]

Flipping bank details is a common internal fraud. They just update the bank details for one payment and put them back and hope nobody notices. Everything looks paid, long debates between companies trying to work out what went wrong etc follow. Sometime they just give up. Its less likely now as systems and fraud teams are wise to it.

[0000]

BertBert said:

ikarl said:

6) Builder checked his email account and had received notification that it had been hacked

I'm wondering what this means. What sort of notification do you get that your email account has been hacked?

In Gmail, it might look like this:

[BertBert]

Google are good aren't they?

[98elise]

Gmail even tells you if your account has been logged into from another device.