chester zoo scam

[wandringstar]

I was just reading in the telegraph how fraudsters changed invoice details and had a payment meant for laing O'Rourke, (who were working for the zoo), paid into their account, total of £1.2 million.

 

Judge felt a suspended sentence was sufficient.

 

It happened to a surveyor I know, he fell victim to this scam and lost £26k, the scammers targeted the accounts department, and the financial clerk unwittingly paid it.

 

 

And once its gone, it aint coming back. Maybe a bank should put some sort of delay on any large payment when it hits a receiving account, both sending bank and receiving bank should have some sort of communication with the customer, to 100 percent verify that it was authorised, and if not it is frozen so cant be sent onwards and can then go back to its rightful owner.

 

In this day and age these scams shouldn't be happening.

 

 

Opinions please, thanks,

 

 

wandringstar.

[TIGHTCHOKE]

I don't think the judge is living in the REAL world!

 

Suspended sentence my ****!

[Vince Green]

If I pay cheques into my account the bank credits the account but the money isn't available to be taken out again for five working days. It wouldn't be hard to do.

[wandringstar]

b.a.c.s. payments are obviously the future, so there ought to be better systems in place, at the moment its too sporadic, when the scammers got the £1.2 million, their account went into overdrive dishing it out to loads of other accounts, this should not have happened, yes the original mistakes were made by chester zoo, but the banks have enough power to stop this in my view.

 

For the price of a forged letterhead, these people were able to lift £1.2 million, its all round ineptitude at its finest.

[AVB]

b.a.c.s. payments are obviously the future, so there ought to be better systems in place, at the moment its too sporadic, when the scammers got the £1.2 million, their account went into overdrive dishing it out to loads of other accounts, this should not have happened, yes the original mistakes were made by chester zoo, but the banks have enough power to stop this in my view.

 

For the price of a forged letterhead, these people were able to lift £1.2 million, its all round ineptitude at its finest.

 

And then people blame the Banks for holding onto their money.

[MrM]

Financial malware in business is massive nowadays with some really sobering facts - somewhere around 40-50% of business have been hit by ransom ware for example. Another one is where the hackers will spoof internal emails (say the MD's for example) and then send an email seemingly from him to finance department asking them to urgently pay a spoof invoice. Pretty much as fast as the malware companies try to combat it, the hackers find new ways round it!

[SxS]

Sadly it's not quite as simple as having a delay period always applied. Lots of firms have legitimate transactions that can see millions of pounds in and out of their accounts in relatively short periods of time (minutes/hours).

 

There should be questions though about how the funds were applied to the scammer's account without being held up in additional checks (which you'd expect to happen if the sums involved were abnormal for that account).

Google and Facebook recently got hit with something similar... and on an even bigger scale!