GARDAI in Killarney have warned the businesses to be aware of the dangers of invoice fraud with the ruthless culprits targeting large and small companies in the area.
Traders have been urged to be vigilant when receiving emails from their suppliers requesting that they make all future payments to a new bank account. The email might look like it’s from a legitimate supplier but, very often, is a fraudster impersonating the supplier.
This invoice redirection scam occurs when a business receives a fraudulent email purporting to be from an existing supplier advising that they have changed bank accounts and request that all future payments be made to a new specified account.
“They might not necessarily request a specific payment at the time of the notification but the next legitimate payment will be made to the fraudsters’ account,” a garda spokesman said.
“The fraud will usually be discovered some time afterwards when the legitimate company sending the invoice queries non-payment,” he added.
Several companies, of various sizes, are being targeted and, according to gardaí, some very sophisticated companies have fallen for the scam and lost extremely large sums of money in the process.
Fraudsters will impersonate an existing supplier either by hacking into their email account, spoofing the sender’s actual address or use an email address that is very similar and almost indistinguishable to the legitimate one.
“A dot or a hyphen could be removed or inserted to make the fraudsters’ email address look almost identical to the legitimate email address of the supplier. The content of the email itself will be extremely convincing,” the garda said.
Killarney Gardaí are advising business owners to always make phone contact with suppliers and establish that the email received originated from them before sending any payments to a new bank account.
“This fraud is becoming more and more prevalent and any business that believes they may have fallen victim to this fraud are asked to contact Killarney Gardaí,” the spokesman added.
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