We’ve all received E-mails over the years from someone claiming to be from an African country, and telling us that they’re trying to get tens of millions of dollars out of their country. Then they appeal to us to begin working with them to get the money out of their country, and they tell us that they’ll reward us handsomely for doing this. But today we’re now dealing with a different kind of financial fraud, and one that can easily grab tens of thousands of dollars or more out of our bank accounts, and leave us scratching our heads wondering how we never saw it coming.
This specific fraud that I’m talking about can happen when you’re involved in a financial transaction, and it’s time for you to now wire the money to someone to complete the transaction. You may receive an E-mail with wiring instructions that include your name, the parties involved in the transaction, the subject of what the money is being wired for, and the exact amount of money to be wired. However, what has been going on is that someone has been hacking into the communications between you and the other party involved in the transaction, and they now know the names of the people involved, the exact nature of the business, and the exact amount of money to be wired. Then when you receive the E-mail containing the wiring instructions, these instructions seem legitimate, and you then follow them and wire the money as requested.
But the instructions were to have you wire the money to another bank, not the one that you’re really supposed to be wiring the money to, and now you’ve lost all of your money. This may seem strange, but it’s actually been going on right now here in the United States. With the way that today’s surveillance technology has been evolving, we’ve unfortunately now gotten to the point where the people who would want to do these kinds of things to us can find ways to listen in on our telephone conversations and read our E-mail. Keeping this in mind, the public doesn’t yet understand the depth of what is now possible when utilizing this kind of technology, making it very easy for us to get burned by it. Unlike the E-mail mentioned earlier that we might receive from someone in Africa, the knowledge that people can now pull this new kind of money-wiring scam on us hasn’t yet become widely known, making everyone much more susceptible to it.
With today’s ever-evolving world of technology, we need to keep up with the ways in which other people will be constantly trying to take even greater advantage of us. So be very, very careful whenever you’re wiring money to someone.