Is That Email From The Boss For Real?

Scammers are persuading executives to send money to Hong Kong banks, where it disappears.

- Sheridan Prasso

If you work for a company that does business around the world, there’s a growing kind of fraud to watch out for: “business email compromise.” Among the victims in recent years are Ferrari NV and Arrow Electronics Inc., which lost millions of dollars after employees were tricked into wiring money to Hong Kong bank accounts.

The scam works like this: An employee in a remote office of a company will receive an email that purports to be from a senior executive or some other person of authority such as a lawyer. The email may be spoofed to look at quick glance like it’s from the boss, with one or two letters incorrect in the address, or it might actually be a hacked account. The email says the employee has been chosen for a special task, demanding secrecy and urgency—and typically requests the immediate transfer of funds to a Hong Kong-based account to make a purchase or to pay an invoice. Once the money is transferred, it’s quickly sent to multiple other accounts, disappearing into mazes of money networks that extend into China and elsewhere.

Global losses have exceeded $12 billion from 78,000 companies in 150 countries since 2013, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which named Hong Kong and Chinese bank accounts as the primary destinations for this type of fraud for the past several years. Such scams increased 136 percent by value in the 18 months through May of this year, following a 1,300 percent increase in the previous period in 2015-16, the FBI says.