Direct Deposit Scam: What You Need To Know

A new wire fraud scam is targeting your direct deposit info. Here’s what you need to know.

Our clients have been seeing more and more of a recent scam which is targeting the HR functions of businesses, convincing employees to swap out your direct deposit banking information to an offshore account. This is often in the form of phishing emails from criminals intending to reroute an employee’s paycheck by direct deposit.

The emails look legitimate at first, as though they came from an employee to the CEO, CFO, or payroll director. They might say something like “I need to update my direct deposit information,” or start with, “Hey, do you have a second?”. If that target person responds, then they start the process of manipulating them into revealing private information. We have also seen hackers phish employees for their password, then use the employee’s legitimate email account to perform the above without the employee ever knowing until their paycheck didn’t arrive.

What’s their aim?

The scammer is trying to convince human resources personnel to change the bank account and routing information the employee uses to have paychecks direct-deposited. Once routed to the criminal’s account, the company is on the hook for replacing the stolen funds, and the employee faces the inconvenience of a late paycheck.

It’s important to take action as soon as possible.

Here are three ways to help combat the scam:

• Get in-person confirmation or call the employee (using the number on the company phone list) for any monetary transaction changes.
• Train your employees to flag emails as potentially suspicious, especially if they come from a new email address.
• Executives should avoid using their personal emails when sending messages to their teams.

How Insource can help

We have already helped clients combat and prevent previous scams, such as the phishing threat for users of Office 365:

https://www.insourceservices.com/new-phishing-threat-aimed-at-office-365-users/

Get in touch with Insource to understand how we can help prevent this scam from affecting your business, and how we can work together to safeguard your business from future scams.

Contact us at insource@insourceservices.com or (781) 235-1490.