Fraudulent Business Email Scams
While spam email is annoying and inconvenient, the average person might not consider it dangerous or malicious on a broad scale. But a recent warning from the FBI on the dangers of what it calls “business e-mail compromise (BEC)” might get people to think twice about what comes across their desks or shows up in their inboxes, since in the past 22 months these email scams have cost the global economy an estimated $1.2 billion.
When looking at the U.S. alone, the agency puts the exposed dollar loss at $747,659,840.63 — affecting more than 7,000 victims.
In his assessment of the FBI’s findings, security expert Brian Krebs points out that BEC, which he refers to as “CEO fraud,” strategically targets a business’ leadership and hijacks their account. Because they’re targeting the CEO and company leadership, the fraudsters don’t follow the same mass-mailing tactics that most phishing email scams do.