£9000 Fraudulent Transaction on My Company - How to Report?

[RegMolehusband]

I am just coming to terms with my smallish company having been conned for the first time in 10 years.

A supposed B2B prospect recently passed himself off as the MD of a prestige car dealer in a convincing way, using the name of the real MD, and blagged a £9000 credit account on the promise of further business to come. The email address used was [e-mail] (I don't need to name this reputable company), however the prestige car trader's domain is actually the .co.uk version. The .com domain was newly registered on July 3rd I have discovered. The credit check for this company was excellent so we duly despatched the goods to his specified delivery address. This was a trading estate in Bolton. It's not unusual for our customers to have a separate delivery address from the invoice address. Two of us had discussions with these fraudsters and it all seemed realistic and plausible at the time.The cost of these goods to us is £6300 that will disappear off last month's bottom line.

The contact numbers, a landline and mobile, provided now both go to a Lycamobile voicemail.

With the benefit of hindsight I know we could have done things better so criticism won't be necessary. When you spend your life dealing with honest people you become complacent and a little naive.

We have spoken to the prestige car dealer to be told that we are the second company to have told them of this fraud. Their recommendation is that we report it as a fraud/cybercrime, as they have already done so themselves. However the ActionFraud website says "Although the police cannot investigate every report individually, the information you provide will aid them. The police use your information to build up intelligence about fraud, which includes who is committing what fraud and against whom". Does anybody have any ideas as to how I could report this in a way that might result in some activity please?

I drove up to the Bolton delivery address this morning. Behind a Cash and Carry there are a couple of untidy lockups with roller shutter doors and inside one is loads of messy racking with products on pallets - fridges, freezers etc, but nothing of ours that I could see.

Does anybody have any ideas as how best to report this to get results please?

Thank you

"Reg"

[Bigends]

Fraudulently ordered goods delivered to an address in Bolton - covered by Greater Manchester Police.

Suggest report the matter to GMP who should record as Fraud and then they will send a referral to action fraud.

They may ask you to refer the matter yourself but you can insist that they record and refer.

At least the address used will hopefully find its way onto their intelligence system

[Trophy Husband]

I feel your pain. We were scammed out of twice that amount 4 weeks ago. Unfortunately, ours was naivety on the part of our office manager accepting a change of bank account details from one of our suppliers via perfect replica e-mail. Subsequently discovered that her e-mail had been compromised and was being watched for certain key words, money, overdue invoice etc. Reported to Action Fraud. The bank to which the monies were paid picked up the activity within 4 hours of the transfer but out of £18007.89 we received the princely sum of £7.89 back. Hard lesson to learn. She handed her resignation in the day after in tears. She is still with us thankfully, as she is ace and has probably saved us twice the loss with her excellent book keeping.

I hope you have a good chance of at least finding the fraudster. Good luck.

[Eddieslofart]

Trophy Husband said:

I feel your pain. We were scammed out of twice that amount 4 weeks ago. Unfortunately, ours was naivety on the part of our office manager accepting a change of bank account details from one of our suppliers via perfect replica e-mail. Subsequently discovered that her e-mail had been compromised and was being watched for certain key words, money, overdue invoice etc. Reported to Action Fraud. The bank to which the monies were paid picked up the activity within 4 hours of the transfer but out of £18007.89 we received the princely sum of £7.89 back. Hard lesson to learn. She handed her resignation in the day after in tears. She is still with us thankfully, as she is ace and has probably saved us twice the loss with her excellent book keeping.

I hope you have a good chance of at least finding the fraudster. Good luck.

It’s not uncommon unfortunately. Last year, a large London Council ( Thought) they had recieved advice from us ( By our headed paper) advising of a change in Bank Account details. 400k went in one hit. The Council had to pay us again, as they hadn’t bothered to check.

Needless to say, every financial movement is now scrutinised by many eyes.

[MDMA .]

Eddieslofart said:

Trophy Husband said:

I feel your pain. We were scammed out of twice that amount 4 weeks ago. Unfortunately, ours was naivety on the part of our office manager accepting a change of bank account details from one of our suppliers via perfect replica e-mail. Subsequently discovered that her e-mail had been compromised and was being watched for certain key words, money, overdue invoice etc. Reported to Action Fraud. The bank to which the monies were paid picked up the activity within 4 hours of the transfer but out of £18007.89 we received the princely sum of £7.89 back. Hard lesson to learn. She handed her resignation in the day after in tears. She is still with us thankfully, as she is ace and has probably saved us twice the loss with her excellent book keeping.

I hope you have a good chance of at least finding the fraudster. Good luck.

It’s not uncommon unfortunately. Last year, a large London Council ( Thought) they had recieved advice from us ( By our headed paper) advising of a change in Bank Account details. 400k went in one hit. The Council had to pay us again, as they hadn’t bothered to check.

Needless to say, every financial movement is now scrutinised by many eyes.

It is the choice of scam at the moment. One of my suppliers (in Holland) emailed months ago with a message not to reply to any emails from them (slightly different email, but same company) asking to re submit bank details due to recent server problems. Will check exactly what it said tomorrow.

[55palfers]

Given how much checkable info the banks want when you open an account these days, I'm amazed there isn't some audit trail to chase the money down.

[Trophy Husband]

55palfers said:

Given how much checkable info the banks want when you open an account these days, I'm amazed there isn't some audit trail to chase the money down.

We haven't given up on ours since the money has gone somewhere. Who opened the receiving bank account? What checks were made? who opened the account that the money was transferred into etc. It is not on that the banks appear to be able to be Teflon in these circumstances. We shall see!!

[FiF]

This isn't what you want to hear. We were subject to a much much smaller fraud, and have effectively been fully refunded, albeit with the caveat that the money could be taken back at a moment's notice pending any developments from investigation.

Cyber crime so local police uninterested beyond pointing towards Action Fraud. Bank not particularly keen on police being involved for some reason. Eventually AF were updated with the results of a bank/victim investigation which provided a package of information including the alleged offenders name, home address, occupation, social media and posts on there which suggested they were in the foreign country and vicinity of the offence at the time. Result was that (In)Action Fraud decided it wasn't even worth passing any information to the local force, not even for a door knock. Not good enough.

My suggestion is that you have at least met the individual, therefore have a description, maybe via CCTV somewhere a picture can be obtained, plus another potential victim with which to make contact. Maybe you can get enough together to provide enough for someone to actually do something. Agsinst that whilst you are chasing this criminal, the business which provides the food on the table is not getting attention, so whilst it's therapeutic to chase the gits, a sensible balance has to be made. Sometimes you just have to move on and, to coin a phrase, accept that a lesson will have been learnt.

Sorry, really hope you catch him, and give him a good kick in the balls, one from me too, not a completely metaphorical one either.

Edited by FiF on Friday 10th August 08:57

[Byker28i]

Theres reports of a lot at the moment with house buying. Solicitors get compromised, email sent regarding account for the house purchase money to be paid to and the money disappears.

[Jubal]

Trophy Husband said:

We haven't given up on ours since the money has gone somewhere. Who opened the receiving bank account? What checks were made? who opened the account that the money was transferred into etc. It is not on that the banks appear to be able to be Teflon in these circumstances. We shall see!!

Good luck to you. It frustrates me no end that there is a perfect electronic audit trail right up to the point that someone withdraws cash yet we hear time and time again that nothing gets done. The first bank in the chain to be guilty of allowing a transfer into a fraudulenty created account should be liable for the loss in my opinion.

[Sheepshanks]

Jubal said:

Trophy Husband said:

We haven't given up on ours since the money has gone somewhere. Who opened the receiving bank account? What checks were made? who opened the account that the money was transferred into etc. It is not on that the banks appear to be able to be Teflon in these circumstances. We shall see!!

Good luck to you. It frustrates me no end that there is a perfect electronic audit trail right up to the point that someone withdraws cash yet we hear time and time again that nothing gets done. The first bank in the chain to be guilty of allowing a transfer into a fraudulenty created account should be liable for the loss in my opinion.

I guess it's mostly done by using gullible people to have their legitimate accounts receive the funds. There's a thread on here from someone whose student son was caught up in it, so obviously action was taken in that case.

[RegMolehusband]

Thank you for your comments. So much fraud and so many crooked people.

All details have been sent by the car dealer to the Lancashire police, the county in which the dealer is based.

[Tango13]

Byker28i said:

Theres reports of a lot at the moment with house buying. Solicitors get compromised, email sent regarding account for the house purchase money to be paid to and the money disappears.

Thanks to a recent thread on this scam I was a lot more careful when transferring to my solicitor, I called them for their details instead of trusting any email they'd sent.

I also called to confirm the money had landed safely straight after the transfer.

[BigMon]

Trophy Husband said:

She handed her resignation in the day after in tears. She is still with us thankfully, as she is ace and has probably saved us twice the loss with her excellent book keeping.

Kudos to you for doing this. I bet she feels terrible.

Scumbag scammers.

[Durzel]

Trophy Husband said:

55palfers said:

Given how much checkable info the banks want when you open an account these days, I'm amazed there isn't some audit trail to chase the money down.

We haven't given up on ours since the money has gone somewhere. Who opened the receiving bank account? What checks were made? who opened the account that the money was transferred into etc. It is not on that the banks appear to be able to be Teflon in these circumstances. We shall see!!

The problem is your office manager transferred the money willingly. The banks involved processed those money transfer requests in good faith. I would wager that in many cases the bank accounts that are used to onward transfer funds around are also compromised.

Basically there are a lot of innocent parties involved throughout the chain, including the banks. Doing due diligence on a customer doesn't mean jack if that customer is blasé about their security and gets hacked.

"CEO fraud" is all the rage at the moment - big payoff for not a huge amount of work.

Edited by Durzel on Friday 10th August 15:55

[Mojooo]

It is absolute pot lock as to whether your local police or the police you reported it to will investigate it.

Whilst a lot (some) of stuff goes to AF and then comes back and dealt with - they do still sometimes investigate fraud locally but it depends on what it is.

[Ian Geary]

Eddieslofart said:

Last year, a large London Council ( Thought) they had recieved advice from us ( By our headed paper) advising of a change in Bank Account details. 400k went in one hit. The Council had to pay us again, as they hadn’t bothered to check.

I work at a large London council, but not that one. Our payments manager is always on about this sort of fraud. We use software to analyse our payment runs before hand to try and spot, and will validate any request to change account details with our contact no. Not the one on the letter.

Having said that, we make 2 payment runs a day, with several hundred items on with £4m being small, and up to £50m some days.

We have a payments team of 4. Preventing fraud is an uphill struggle, and I can't believe how apathetic the banks are given there is an electronic trail left behind.

[buggalugs]

I’ve never found Action Fraud very useful. I had an attempted scam once with a client, similar to OP where a similar domain is registered and used to impersonate. AF not interested because no money was lost.

Thing is, do they think this is the first time they’ve tried it? Or the last?

I usually track the emails back, they often use a cheap VPS somewhere to operate. Usually the provider isn’t interested when I tell them but I did have one respond that they’d cancelled the fraudster’s account, which was nice.

Domain registrars are 100% not interested in fraud. Ultimately the domain registrar has taken payment to reg the domain and the VPS provider has taken payment for that from someone, so if someone in authority have a st that’s an avenue they could go down.

[RegMolehusband]

The fake domain name is registered with GoDaddy. On WhoIs.com I notice there's an [e-mail] email address. I've suggested that the prestige car dealer contacts them via this as they are quite upset about their name being used in this manner.