Internet scammers are more likely to pretend to be a colleague or friend in order to seize money. The multimillion-dollar scam of the Pathé chain of cinemas by a fake top man was no exception, say security experts. In this way, ordinary citizens are also tempted to make substantial transfers.
Company detective Dick Steffens has recently seen more such fraud cases passing by. For example, we recently received a call from a Dutch company that takes care of the financial affairs of “a very large company with its head office in Europe”.
They got an email from the top man, they thought. He said: ‘We are working on a major acquisition. Can you transfer €250,000 to this Polish bank account? That’s what happened. A day later another e-mail arrived: ‘Apparently something went wrong with the transfer’. At the end of the week, € 900,000 was lost.
These are just two of the many examples.
Together with Log1cIT specialists and foreign financial intelligence agencies, we have developed an efficient method to carry out extensive social engineering and threat intelligence research within 5 working days. It is advisable to combine this with an address search, registration and authorised representative(s) of the bank account used for the fraudulent acts.