Getty Images
More than 70 people have been arrested in the U.S. and Nigeria in recent months and accused of participating in a sophisticated email scam that has targeted American businesses and cost them hundreds of millions of dollars this year alone, authorities said on Monday.
In a sweep dubbed Operation Wire Wire, the FBI targeted an alleged West African organized crime ring and others who sent fake messages to companies’ finance departments purporting to be a vendor for the company with an invoice requiring payment.
“They are doing their research…going onto company websites and looking for the right people,” FBI assistant director Scott Smith, who helped lead the operation, said in an interview. “They may even go as far as pulling annual reports and finding what companies they do business with and spoofing those accounts” — that is, impersonating other firms in emails to the main target.
The number of complaints to the FBI’s internet crime center about so-called “business email compromise” scams has shot up in recent years. In 2015, the center said it received 8,000 complaints by either businesses or individuals who reported that money was mistakenly wired in response to fraudulent emails asking for payment. Victims reported $275 million in losses in 2015, the FBI said, and that had more than doubled by 2017 to $675 million. The losses appear to be on track to more than double again in 2018, with $685 million in such losses reported by 4,081 victims to the FBI’s internet crime complaint center for the first quarter of 2018 alone.
Also popular on WSJ.com: