The Expert Podcast

Here's another tragic story out of Maryland where the ID scammers even shamelessly go after government agencies. Here's a volunteer fire department that was buying 200 almost quar million dollars worth of new equipment and somebody spoofed an email and convinced their payables Department to wire the money to a scammer.

Right, and this is how this works. We see this all the time. If you're buying something or you're a company that buys and sells things, for example, what probably happened was the company that sells ambulances or this equipment was hacked. The scammers will hack into your company and not even let you know about it. They won't do anything to make you aware of it, they won't try to ransomware you, but they'll monitor your emails back and forth for months sometimes. They'll see that this ambulance company was selling ambulances to this Rockville Fire Department volunteer fire department.

So they saw the dollar amount, they saw the names, they saw the information on these emails going back and forth. And then what they did was they made up a new email address and a fake website that made it look like it was this ambulance company. They sent an email to the Rockville fire department that said, "Look, your ambulances are ready, here's the wire transfer information, wire the money here." They had the logo, the right name of the rep from the ambulance company, all these things, and they sent it to the Fire Department. Fire department gets this email, looks legit, and they just blast out the money. Now they're out the money.

So what do you do about this? Well, if you're a company that's going to wire transfer money, the most important thing to do is, if it's a significant amount, do a test transfer first. Wire $100 to whoever you're going to pay this money to, and then call them up on the phone, the number you know is right based on something printed, based on their actual website, or something that's tangible that you know, and say, "Hey, did you get the $100?" If they say yes, then you go back to your bank and make them wire the full amount to the same wire transfer information, same routing number, same account number. Don't change anything. That way you know you're protected because these alternate ID scams are affecting real estate companies, equipment companies, real estate companies have adapted to this.

So a lot of them now are telling their customers, "Watch out for these emails." So now these scammers are going to other places where they know there's big dollar amounts. Think about it, volunteer fire department, they're not sophisticated financially sophisticated. So they find out, well, who do they pay money to? Well, the fire equipment companies. Let's hack into them, watch their emails for six months, get all their transactions that are pending, and then blast out wire transfer emails to a bunch of their customers to divert the payments to us as scammers. You see how this works?

So if you are a company that either sends out a lot of money or receives a lot of money, you can click the link below, we can do a consultation that will give you a very specific best practices guideline to avoid this from happening so that tragically you're not out all of your hard-earned money or your donated money or you don't have your clients that are losing money that's going of make you look bad and you lose sales.