CEO fraud costs almost 42.3 million dollars

Just got lucky again

One of the biggest cases of business email compromise fraud occurred back in July this year. A company from Singapore fell victim to the perfidious fraud scheme. The company in question received an email purporting to come from a supplier. It asked for an outstanding payment to be transferred to a new bank account. Nobody noticed that the e‑mail address was slightly different from the supplier’s official address. Accordingly, 42.3 million US dollars were transferred to the fraudulent account. The scam only came to light four days later when the real supplier contacted the company to remind them of the payment. The company reacted immediately and called the police, who called in Interpol. Within a few days, 39 million dollars were frozen from the fraudster’s account. In addition, further investigations led to the arrest of seven suspects and the return of a further 2 million US dollars to the victim company.

Refined

CEO fraud, also known as Business Email Compromise (BEC), is an increasingly sophisticated form of financial fraud. Hackers gain access to executives’ email accounts or imitate their identity in order to deliberately deceive employees and get them to make transfers to fake accounts. 

Typical procedure

The typical process looks something like this: The perpetrators first gain access to an email account of an executive, e.g. the managing director or CFO. They then send a message from this account to employees in accounting or financial administration, requesting an urgent transfer to a new account. In doing so, they imitate the writing style and habits of the manager concerned in order to feign the authenticity of the request. Sometimes, as in the example of the company from Singapore, the email addresses used differ only slightly from the official addresses.

Raising awareness helps

All employees need to be made aware of this. Our partner Pished.io offers automated security awareness programs that help to prevent this from happening. 

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