Increasing numbers of people are being defrauded out of large sums of money by scammers accessing the email accounts of legitimate businesses. Known as invoice fraud, the crime involved fraudsters monitoring a business' emails, waiting for it to send an invoice to a customer for a large amount of money. The scammer would then send their own email to the customer, from the business' email address, informing them its bank account number had changed and asking them to instead put the money into the fraudster's account. Within business transactions people put a lot of trust in email and electronic invoicing these days, so they are used in day to day operations. Ms Ryan said there was no guarantee the bank or the hacked business would refund the victim their money.

Source: Otago Daily Times July 08, 2019 20:48 UTC