New Banking Fraud Scam
There have been instances of a new banking fraud scam taking place which are known to have meant losses for some businesses, please take a moment to understand the scam and avoid it.
Essentially it works like this;
The fraud takes place via email. An email is received to an individual within the business who has responsibility for making or generating electronic payments (accounts payable / bookkeeper etc). The email is purporting to be from the owner or director of a customer/ supplier where genuine payments have been made previously. The email asks for the account details to be changed and/or a payment to be made. Typically payment amounts are under £15k as these attract less attention within the banking system. In most cases it appears that the customer/ supplier’s email account has been hacked with the fraudulent emails very in similar style to the legitimate emails.
The scam is often undetected by the business as commonly no payment is requested at the time, only a change of banking details. Suffice to say, the next time a genuine payment request is received the funds are paid to the fraudster and your cash is lost.
If a call or email is received along these lines please do not make any changes to the payment records you have. Call someone you know at the beneficiary from a number you have on your records, make the call from a different phone. Check properly that everything is legitimate.
This type of fraud is not always recoverable from your bank, please be aware and don’t get caught out.