Chinese Scammers Take Mattel To the Bank, Phishing Them For $3 Million (www.cbc.ca)

itwbennett quotes a report from The Associated Press: Mattel, the popular toy maker behind Barbie and Hot Wheels, was the victim of a phishing attack last year that nearly cost them $3 million. On April 30, 2015, a Mattel finance executive got a note from the new CEO, Christopher Sinclair, requesting a new vendor payment to China. Transfers required approval from two high-ranking managers; the finance exec qualified and so did the CEO. The transfer was made. The only thing preventing a total loss was the fact that the following day was a bank holiday. Details of the attack against Mattel come from a report by the Associated Press, investigating money laundering and other financial crime in Wenzhou, China.

Comments

Re:Interesting that this isn't reversible

[Rande]

It would be reversible...if the money stayed in the destination account.
However, what they do is then split the money into many, many accounts, and keep moving it, travelling the world until it's laundered enough to recover.
As each account would require a court order to disclose what happened to the money in it, and different countries have different requirements to disclose and different languages, by the time they've chased down the money, it's already moved on - so they just don't bother.

No they didn't

[DNS-and-BIND]

It's right there in the article.

May 1 was a banking holiday in China. The following Monday they were able to get assistance from local law enforcement and banking officials to freeze the account that held the stolen funds. Two days later, the money was recovered.

It's like Slashdot hasn't changed at all since the new Backslash guy or whatever his nick was took over. We're still getting all the duplicate stories and just plain wrong news. Sigh.

Re:Interesting that this isn't reversible

[DNS-and-BIND]

Yeah, but China isn't just any country. This isn't Romania. There are tons of controls on international transactions. Otherwise there would be a giant sucking sound for a month or two and China would be empty of funds. Nobody trusts Chinese banks, especially Chinese banks. This is why property is always super-hot in China and prices everyone out of the market - there's really nowhere else to invest money.

Re:Interesting that this isn't reversible

[geeper]

Here is a podcast that is a great example of how to do this and explains how easy it is.

http://www.npr.org/sections/mo...

Re:offtopic semantic nazism

[MyLongNickName]

From the Article

"Two days later, the money was recovered."

So the semantics from the summary were correct and it is the title is somewhat inaccurate or at least misleading.

Re:Dumb

[110010001000]

In our company the policy is you need to contact the CEO verbally in order to do these transactions. No one authorizes multimillion transactions via email, because of these phishing attacks. So there is your insight.