Fraud Warning: CEO Bank Scam

We have recently been made aware of an email scam that is perpetuating across the internet.

Our friends at Griffin Forensics – http://griffinforensics.com/ – have produced a report on this scam, a copy of which is linked to further below in this blog post.

“Griffin Forensics Ltd have just investigated an email fraud in which a client lost £20k.
The FD received an email, purporting to be from the CEO requesting the immediate CHAPS transfer of monies to an external account and asked what details were required to enable it to happen. The FD answered and the CEO then supplied details of a bank account and the amount to be transferred.
The transfer was then made.
Suspicions were raised when the CEO sent another email requesting that a further £25k was transferred to another account in payment of an invoice. This time the CEO’s PA was included in the email from the CEO.
The FD then carried out further confirmation checks and it was discovered that both requests were fraudulent.
Our investigation identified that the email used a spoof company email address with a redirect going to a third address. There was evidence to suggest that the email had originated from Lagos, Nigeria.”

Please watch out for this scam and make any people in a position to be susceptible to this kind of attack aware.

In order to harden your email systems against such phishing or scam attacks, please contact us for a quote for our Third Party Email Filtering Service.