email hacked & bank fraud - what to do next?

juliec1977

bit of a long story but I need help with if and how I can reclaim money which was taken fraudulantly..
basically we have just opened a shop, we were due to pay the deposit to the local council - we had several emails from the relevant department with leases, bank details etc, we then paid the deposit in 3 transactions over a period of 2 months from our hsbc business account... the council said they had not recevied the money and after making several checks it would appear that our email had been hacked and the bank details changed - the money was paid into a fraudulant nationwide account.

We immediately notified both our bank and the nationwide one who have said they will investigate (this was back in July) - we have received a letter from hsbc saying that as we authorised the transactions on internet banking there is nothing they can do - Nationwide wont tell us anything due to data protection - and action fraud are useless too - we reported it to the police (hoping that someone would actually come and see the emails etc and hopefully put a trace (bearing in mind that invoices we were emailing out were being hacked and bank details on them amended - I was even emailing back and forth to the hackers pretending to be a customer about to pay - they changed the bank details several times), action fraud can take months for them to investigate - meanwhile we are £2000 out of pocket...
we had to scrape every penny together to pay the deposit so we could open the shop and now we are totally skint - so can anyone help - what/where/who/how can I reclaim this money before we go bust

thanks in advance

nidO

I think you're going to struggle with this beyond hoping for the best with what you've already done unfortunately.

Your bank has done nothing wrong as they've sent money to a recipient you authorised them to, the best they can do is chase up the money with Nationwide, however if the money went into a Nationwide account then straight back out to another account (probably overseas) then your money is basically gone, unless the police catch whoever defrauded you there is no-one to "reclaim" it from.

This is the sort of story that tabloids occasionally like to drag out though which can sometimes get a "we're getting dragged into the press, must make ourselves look helpful to the poor consumer/small business owner" payment out of the bank usually accompanied by a "sorry we weren't as helpful as we expect ourselves to have been in the first instance" kind of spokesman quote, but unfortunately I wouldn't pin too much on that. Tony Hetherington is an example of the kind of journo to contact.

Best advice I can really give is to thoroughly review the security of your computer(s) and email account access, as it's evidently badly lacking.

eskbanker

If I'm reading all that correctly [edit: seemingly not, see below!] there are two entirely separate issues, one relating to payments you were making and another for those you were expecting to receive:

1. Someone adjusted a payee's details within your online banking so that payments intended for one recipient went to another
2. Invoices you were emailing out were mysteriously changed somewhere along the line so that the payment details on them were changed to point to someone else's account instead of yours

Even if the second one is related to hacking emails, the first would suggest that someone else has access to your online banking, which I'd see as more serious, so if you haven't already then you need to get that addressed with HSBC immediately.

As above, it's unlikely that there's going to be much else you can do to recover the funds, although it's unclear whether the £2K you refer to is the deposit that didn't make it to the council or the funds you were expecting from customers that you'd invoiced, or both together? If you're saying that the invoices you emailed were adjusted after you'd sent them, are you sure that it wasn't the invoice recipients who were doing this?

Edit: looks like I misunderstood some of this and it is purely an email issue, albeit affecting both inbound and outbound payments

grumbler

eskbanker wrote: »

If I'm reading all that correctly there are two entirely separate issues, one relating to payments you were making and another for those you were expecting to receive:

1. Someone adjusted a payee's details within your online banking so that payments intended for one recipient went to another

My understanding is that the e-mailed invoices were adjusted and the victim used the incorrect details for making bank transfers (not necessarily online).

Invoices you were emailing out were mysteriously changed somewhere along the line so that the payment details on them were changed to point to someone else's account instead of yours

Yes, this was the case, not a separate issue.

agrinnall

eskbanker wrote: »

1. Someone adjusted a payee's details within your online banking so that payments intended for one recipient went to another
2. Invoices you were emailing out were mysteriously changed somewhere along the line so that the payment details on them were changed to point to someone else's account instead of yours

I think you are reading it incorrectly, I don't see anything to suggest that 1 has happened, it's all 2.

I'm afraid I don't think you're going to get anywhere with the bank on this because they have acted on your instructions. Your only chance is to press to get the police involved in the hope that they can track down the fraudsters so that you can attempt to recover the money. I wouldn't hold out much likelihood of success so I suggest you consider it as lost money and concentrate on where to go from here.

juliec1977

thanks for all your replies.. I was hoping someone would be able to give me some great news about how we can recover the money - however its not looking that way..

Yes there are 2 issues.

the council emailed us bank details - this email was hacked and the bank details changed - therefore we have paid the money to a fraud account.

the 2nd issue is that again emails we send out were hacked and our bank details on our invoices were changed to a fraud account so our customers would pay the money into the fake account - luckily one of our regular customers recevied a "stroppy" email asking them to pay urgently - she alerted us as she didnt think it seemed correct - the fraudsters had created an email address the same as ours with one letter missing so it would be noticed.

no one has access to the online bank part - that is all ok thankfully..

We do have virus checkers etc on our pc so im not sure how our emails were hacked to start with - in addition to this we were in the process of leaving our current isp - so is there a question as to security on the emails as we had given notice..

I did read on another page that its possible to fight against Nationwide as they are in the wrong for opening an account which was then used for fraud purposes.. im not sure how true this is though.

They did advise us that the account was frozen but cannot tell us anything about whether any of our funds are there to reclaim

takman

I would recommend changing your email password to something unique as a precaution. Also it's worth mentioning that emails are in no way considered to be a secure form of communication. Anyway can very easily send an untraceable email and make it appear to come from any email address they choose.

juliec1977

thanks - we do have all the necessary protection on the pc and immediately changed all email passwords, however we were in the process of moving from Virgin Media to another supplier - so theres a part of me that is wondering how secure things were from their end once we had given notice..

I did try to speak to virgin media but the chap in India really wasnt understanding what I was trying to say!

juliec1977

we changed all passwords immediately - yes its certainly opened our eyes up!
Im amazed at how the emails are clearly showing that tey are coming from us - its only when you click the reply button that they are very slightly different - and to be honest you wouldnt even notice!!

takman

Also I wouldn't just sign up to your ISP's emails service I would use something like Google Mail. On there you can setup 2 step verification. Even if someone had my googlemail password they couldn't log into my email unless they also had my mobile phone and password to unlock my phone.

colsten

juliec1977 wrote: »

I did read on another page that its possible to fight against Nationwide as they are in the wrong for opening an account which was then used for fraud purposes.. im not sure how true this is though.

They did advise us that the account was frozen but cannot tell us anything about whether any of our funds are there to reclaim

You could try and "fight" them, in Court, I presume. This would present a number of significant challenges to you, starting with proving that Nationwide knew that the account would be used for fraudulent purposes, and allowed it to be used for fraud once they had information, or the suspicion, that it was. Your next challenge would be to prove that any money that might still be in the account is in fact yours.

You wouldn't get anywhere with Nationwide without a Solicitor and a Court order, which would cost you a lot of money. Even then there is no guarantee that you'd get any of your money back. Some people have lost hundreds of thousands in similar scams. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/borrowing/mortgages/11715616/Our-300000-house-buying-money-was-stolen.html

Best to focus on moving forward, as has already been suggested.