News 27 Jan, 2016 Wire Transfer Fraud Beware wire transfer fraud! Business email addresses are being intercepted in order fraudulently to divert funds Download PDF The International Chamber of Commerce’s Commercial Crime Services has reported a 270% increase since January 2015 in the number of victims reporting losses caused by internet hacking of business email addresses, a phenomenon known as business email compromise (“BEC”) - see https://icc-ccs.org/news/1123-millions-lost-due-to-wire-transfer-fraud Some of these victims include Club members who have received an apparently legitimate request (often where the payment needs to be made urgently) to change the beneficiary bank details for a payment but where the funds have not been received by the claimant/beneficiary. Members affected have not to date been able to recover the sums diverted. Precautions that the ICC recommend include: To avoid your own email system from being intercepted: Create intrusion detection system rules that flag e-mails with extensions that are similar to company e-mail. For example, the system would flag up if the e-mail address of “abc_company.com” is changed to “abc-company.com” (ie the subtle change from underscore to hyphen in the email addresses); Ensure that you have up to date malware protection to prevent infiltration of networks which would enable fraudsters to access your organisation’s emails and to steal information from which convincing fraudulent emails can be crafted; Improve the security awareness of all employees in your organisation, for example, not to click on any link in an email or text message unless it has been confirmed that it is legitimate and never to use a password from their business accounts on a non-business account.  (This will ensure that if an employee’s personal email address is compromised their business email is still protected.) Employee awareness is key. As the Financial Times reported on 20 November 2015, in an attempt to raise awareness by its