Q. What impact do scams and fraud have on business?
A. An in-depth investigative study by Better Business Bureau (BBB) finds that business email compromise scams are skyrocketing in frequency and have cost businesses and other organizations more than $3 billion since 2016.
Business email compromise fraud is an email phishing scam that typically targets people who pay bills in businesses, government and nonprofit organizations. It affects both big and small organizations, and it has resulted in more losses than any other type of fraud in the U.S., according to the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).
The investigative study – “Is That Email Really From ‘The Boss?’ The Explosion of Business Email Compromise (BEC) Scams” – looks at the prevalence of BEC scams and the criminal systems that perpetrate them.
BEC fraud takes many forms, but in essence, the scammer poses as a reliable source that sends an email from a spoofed or hacked account to an accountant or chief financial officer (CFO), asking them to wire money, buy gift cards or send personal information, often for a plausible reason. If money is sent, it goes into an account controlled by the con artist.