WIRE TRANSFERS:
BE SKEPTICAL!
From: Jimmy Smits <jsmits@yourcompany.com>
Date: Tuesday, January 19, 2016 at 7:55 AM
To: Gulliver Bill<gullibill@yourcompany.com>
Subject: Invoice
Gulliver,
I have an invoice due to a company that i would like payment to be sent to them today via Wire Transfer, can i send you their wiring instruction so you can help me get this process right away?
Thanks
Jimmy
If you get one of these messages, you may have someone attempting to steal either your passwords, files, identity, or money.
-
Security message from your bank
-
Receipt for an item that you didn't purchase
-
Wire transfer request from your company president
-
Account-locked message
If these seem a bit unusual, they likely are fake. The picture above "looks" authentic but notice a few oddities:
- Wellsfargo is spelled as one word
- The "from" address is wells.com (not a bank web site)
- The "to" address is blank
- The email application thought it might be spam
- If you were to hover your mouse over the link, it would go to a DIFFERENT location than the underlined text.
These are all very common techniques by the bad guys to get your information. If you have received a "I need you to wire some money right away" message from your company president, here's what happened:
- The bad guys got on LinkedIn and figured out who is the boss and who is the finance person
- They faked an email (super easy to do)
- They sent it with a sense of urgency, knowing that finance folks rarely want to question the boss especially if they seem like they are in a hurry
If they fall for it, the finance person replies with either a wire transfer to a fraudulent account, or with account credentials.
What should you do? Just call your coworker and verify they truly intended to send this request. If so, then proceed. If not, ignore it and mark it as spam.
Learn more at this article from Fortune Magazine.