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This may not be brand new but I've heard about it 3 time now in the last 2 months but not ever before. As of now, every incident of which I know has effected companies and, now, a local government.
This has tended to be relatively big money, from a sizable piece of a million to several but I'll bet it goes downmarket to our level.
The scam is with wire transfers and hacked email accounts. I'm theoretically retired now but I have a few construction company clients that I provide services for, part time 1099, from the house. I'm from Atlanta and spent decades commuting hours a day. I get along fine with my now 40 foot commute.
One of the companies was well overdue for an approx $750K payment a couple of months ago. We finally got notice that we would receive payment by wire transfer on a certain day. No payment, a call to the owner the next day was received with surprise because they claimed they sent it to the new routing number that we had provided via email 2 days before. The routing number was nothing related to us so the email in question was sent. It looked perfect, had the company logo and all the correct info and was sent and referred to by name, the office manager as the sender. Except for one small detail in the sender's return address, the character "&" in our email address was a "-".
Cops, lawyers and everyone imaginable were called but the money went through a series of shell companies very like Hunter Biden's and disappeared. We eventually got paid but it hurt the owner badly.
Heard about the same scam to another contractor shortly after but read about the local County losing a few million just a week or so back. The news story read like a repeat of ours
Our lesson is: up front, paper checks ONLY!
But I started thinking, wire transfers go way downhill from there. I wired to the IRS 12 days ago, two of my clients direct deposit for me. I sold a lot of PM's on GIM2 a few years back that was paid mostly by wire. I pay most of my monthly bills by direct deposit.
The criminals just may make things very difficult for the rest of us in the next few years.
Edited by TomD - 4/27/2024, 07:44 PM
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Happened to a family business last year. Five digits. Same scenario exactly
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1 replies since 28/4/2024, 00:38 65 views
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