BEC Scammers Go After Employee Paychecks

An upward trend has been recorded with business email compromise (BEC) scams where fraudsters trick human resource departments into changing an employee’s direct deposit information to divert paychecks into an account they control. In a typical BEC scam, the fraudster sends an email to an employee authorized to make wire transfers and deceives them into sending the money into an unauthorized account. The underlying principle remains the same, only this time the victim could be anyone in the company. An email from an address that displays the name of the victim is sent to someone in the finance or the human resources department requesting to change the details for the existing direct deposit account; the crook also asks about the information necessary to complete the process. “From this point, the threat actor will be thinking on their feet to a certain extent; their main aim is to avoid being directed to any online third-party HR solution that would require access details they do not possess,” James Linton of Agari. He notes that requesting from the crook a voided check to verify the new account details does not deter their actions. They could play the social engineering card again, as described in the full article. Read the full article at Bleeping Computer.