August 6, 2024 By Lawrence Abrams
A global stop-payment mechanism created by INTERPOL successfully recovered over $40 million stolen in a BEC attack on a company in Singapore.
INTERPOL says this is the largest recovery of funds stolen through a business email compromise (BEC) scam.
BEC scams are a type of cyberattack in which cybercriminals attempt to redirect legitimate corporate payments to an attacker-controlled bank account.
These attacks are conducted by threat actors compromising a vendor's or company's email address to trick billing departments into approving new banking information where payment should be sent. When the threat actors receive the payment, they quickly use money mules to drain the account or transfer it to numerous other accounts under their control.
The 2023 FBI IC3 Report says that they received 21,489 complaints with $2.9 billion in reported losses due to business email compromise in 2023.
