Email Scams: The FBI Says Businesses Are Losing Millions from Being Duped

The worst type of email scam today is one that not only fools employees in companies, but also the executives. And that’s exactly what’s happening now, despite so many being aware of how dangerous email scams are. As the structure of many companies becomes increasingly more complex, more business dealings occur via email. With so many email scam artists creating emails that look legitimate, it becomes extra challenging trying to decipher what’s real and what isn’t.

This is even more prevalent with companies dealing with international business deals. With so many email scams coming from foreign countries, a company dealing in international business interests might be fooled when seeing one related to wire transfers.

The FBI is thankfully up on all the statistics about these scams. Recently, they reported that businesses across the country have lost over $215 million in the last year due to having their emails hijacked from email scams. They cite a couple of examples of why this happened, and it has everything to do with American business expansion overseas.

Business Email Compromise

Abbreviated as “BEC”, business email compromise is now one of the most common threats out there. In many cases, these are faux wire transfers relating to the shipping of international goods. Because so many businesses are doing this now to expand their markets, it’s getting harder to tell where the real emails are. When you’re a business depending on these international contracts to stay profitable, you can see how this can lead to new breaches of security.

What’s worse, another email scam called “CEO Fraud” now has scam artists posing as executives from those international markets. Those responsible for wire transfers and shipping goods open these and then allow the scammers to access the business’s email server.

You can guess what happens next. Once a company leaves themselves open to online thieves, there isn’t any limit to what those thieves take or compromise. With that staggering multi-million dollar loss to businesses, you can see just how much they’re taking.

This could be happening to your own business without you even realizing it until months later. You need a professional IT team that understands what’s going on out there and utilizes preventative measures to never let it happen again.

We’ll do that for you here at Global IP Networks. Contact us and we’ll show you how many excellent IT solutions we provide for companies, from the cloud to the very best security technology.