Scam help please

Blackbeard_of_Perranporth

Recently when I was in San Francisco I received an email from my accountant regarding payment and new banking details. It suggested to cancel my Standing Order and set up a new one. I knew he was moving, so cancelled my Standing Order on the app. When I came back to the UK and before I paid the new account, I rang him to confirm the details.


I was the only one of his clients to do so!

PDC

There was a near identical thread to this I remember reading here around six months ago. Will see if I can find it and how that ended...

Takmon

elliep wrote: »

I've been communicating with the tradesman since the original post and he says the police have advised him that I am still liable for the full bill which I haven't paid to him. It is me who has been scammed and not him. However he also states that he recognises the delay in noticing the lack of payment was a fault at his end and his email provider have also been at fault for not noticing the hack. So he has offered to wait the further 3 months while the bank investigate, and stated that he won't chase me for any money at any point.

His email account certainly won't have been "hacked" because that would mean their is a flaw in the emails providers security and all accounts on their service would have been compromised and it would have been in the news.

What has most likely happened is that he has inadvertenly given out his password through some kind of phishing attempt and they have gained access to his emails that way. So that would be entirely his fault and not the fault of the email provider.

But you should remember in future that emails are in no way secure (unless encrypted). I could send you an email that appears to come from any email address I choose and wouldn't need access to their account and this isn't difficult.

AndyPix

This is a time tested scam unfortunately, I have seen it many times


What i do find strange is that a tradesman would go so long without sending an invoice .. That would have me doubting him a little bit.


I wouldnt offer up payment just yet , see how things unfold - sorry i cant offer any info on the legalities of it all, just that is definitely a scam that happens.


Perhaps the builder is quite shrewd and also knows of this scam and his trying his luck ? who knows , but as i said its a bit strange how he hasnt noticed not just yours, but other missing payments :huh:

elliep_2

The tradesman is a plumber I know from church. I trust him and know he's not the one scamming me.

I'm really annoyed with him because it's taken so long to come to light and if he had robust admin procedures then he'd have sent me a genuine invoice and noticed that it hadn't been paid multiple months ago, which may not have had a different outcome but at least I'd have known we'd done all we could to recover the money.

I haven't offered any payment, but we have agreed to await the outcome of the bank investigation then discuss.
I think that covering the cost of materials but not time, or 50% of the bill would be fair so it's a split loss.

He's been at fault for being extremely disorganised, not invoicing me or chasing it and thereby letting this go on for so long and reducing the chances of getting the money back.

I've been at fault for falling for a scam, allbeit a type of scam I'd never been warned about, and coming directly from his email address which had been compromised through no fault of mine. I do feel that there's more fault on his end than mine but the outcome could have been the same if the scam invoice came a day before the real one anyway. I'll never know how the scammer got into his email account.

He's offered to let me off the whole bill, which is good of him as it means he takes the whole loss, but then he's out of pocket for a weeks work and all the materials, which I don't feel is fair. Just gotta wait for the outcome from the bank now and will take it from there.

If anyone knows how to search the previous thread that was mentioned above then that'd be really helpful.

Thanks all for your thoughts.

DoaM

FWIW, a story like this was on Here Come The Sheriffs ... a supplier provided food and services to a Party Organiser company. The PO company received a fake invoice from the supplier's hacked account advising changed bank details ... PO paid the invoice amount to the scammer.

Once the hack was identified the supplier notified the PO and agreed to a 50% reduction in the invoice. PO refused to pay so the supplier eventually had to go to court, won (default judgment I think) and then called in HCEO when PO wouldn't pay. PO eventually paid (a lot more to) the HCEO.

tl;dr ... whilst you're likely a consumer rather than a business, the same principle applies - if the plumber takes you to court there's a better-than-average chance that he'll win.

tempus_fugit

Takmon wrote: »

His email account certainly won't have been "hacked" because that would mean their is a flaw in the emails providers security and all accounts on their service would have been compromised and it would have been in the news.

What has most likely happened is that he has inadvertenly given out his password through some kind of phishing attempt and they have gained access to his emails that way. So that would be entirely his fault and not the fault of the email provider.

But you should remember in future that emails are in no way secure (unless encrypted). I could send you an email that appears to come from any email address I choose and wouldn't need access to their account and this isn't difficult.

More than likely the account hasn't even been compromised. As you say, emails are not secure, and all it takes is for an email to be intercepted, or information about the company's transactions obtained in some other way, and then they can spoof emails to appear to come from the legitimate account and send them to customers with false payment details.

So, it may not be the company's fault nor the customer's fault , but it's also not the fault of the customers of the bank who will have to bear the burden if the bank compensates the customer. So, there's no solution unless the money can be recovered from the scammers, which is unlikely.

The only way to protect against this in the future is to treat all details sent by email or other methods of communication, e.g. text message, carefully and always double-check with the actual company by phone before sending funds, but no doubt despite publicity of these scams people will still fall foul of them due to either lack of awareness or a feeling that "it won't happen to me".

elliep_2

I'd never heard of this type of scam before. I thought I was fairly aware and would never fall for a phishing scam. I've hung up on people who are probably genuine multiple times because they call me then want me to verify myself through providing them with my personal details, but won't verify themselves by telling me how long I've held the account or anything else I ask.

I fell for this because I had no idea that scammers worked this way and will certainly be much more careful in future. I've also posted my story on my social media to help inform my friends and help them to be wiser than I was.

My plumber has offered to let me off the whole bill, but that doesn't seem fair to him so we've agreed to wait for the outcome of the bank investigation and then discuss. I plan to offer him 50% of whatever isn't recovered from the scammers. I feel that's a fair offer as there were definitely faults on his side, as well as the fact I fell for the scam. It was a clever scam and would have been difficult to see through without the awareness this kind of thing can happen.

The scammer had a 2 way conversation with me by email, so was receiving messages sent to my plumber as well as sending them from his address. I don't know enough about how email works to understand exactly what happened or who exactly was at fault but I've certainly learned not to trust email in future without verifying through other means.

Even re-reading the messages now there were minimal clues and I can't blame myself for falling for something I'd never been warned about. But I've done what I can to warn others, and after reading more about this I see that being £1.1k out of pocket (1/2 the bill) is getting off lightly. At least it was the new boiler it affected and not the new windows that I had fitted a month prior for 4x the price.

hollydays

Sign up to your police forces alert scheme and receive warning by email.
There are also examples recently of scammers sending people very convincing letters from their bank