Another day, another email scam – This time, wicked scammers have stolen over $1,000,000 from Save the Children, an international non-governmental organization based in London, United Kingdom.
This happened after scammers compromised the email address of one of the Save the Children employees and generated fake invoices and other documents to trick the charity organization into sending 1 million dollars to a bank account in Japan.
See: How to Teach Your Employees About Cybersecurity
The attack which took place in March 2017, was part of a business e-mail compromise (BEC) scheme in which cyber criminals compromise email addresses of known people in the company to scam them into wiring a large sum of money to bank accounts owned by malicious elements.
In the attack against Save the Children, according to Boston Globe, the scammers claimed to buy solar panels for health centers in Pakistan, a country where Save the Children has been operational for 30 years and seen as a respectable organization. Unfortunately, the cybercriminals ended up stealing 1 million dollars from the organization and only $112,000 could be recovered.
“We have improved our security measures to help ensure this does not happen again,” chief financial officer of Save the Children FederationStacy Brandom the Globe.
This, however, is not the first time when the charity organization has been targeted by cybercriminals. In another incident, Save the Children mistakenly sent $9,210 to a bank account in Africa provided by cybercriminals. The funds were recovered after the officials realized they have been scammed.
In another incident, Google and Facebook were tricked by a Lithuanian man who impersonated as an employee of a famous Asian company. The scammer was using phishing emails to collect the details of wire transactions and other relevant details just to make his case more believable – In the end, he scammed both companies with $100 million.
Last year, Lori Sattler, a 51-year-old Acting State Supreme Court Justice was also scammed into sending over a million dollars to a bank account in China. In her case, she received an email from someone pretending to be her lawyer asking her to send money to a bank account.
The FBI, on the other hand, is well aware of the increasing BEC attacks. In June this year, the Beauru arrested 74 individuals after disrupting the international gang of cybercriminals. If you run a business linked with online transactions it is your responsibility to make sure your employees good at detecting scams. Here are some simple tips on how to teach your employees about cybersecurity.
