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One of Australia's Richest Men Lost $1 Million To Email Scam (bloomberg.com)
Kaye Wiggins, reporting for Bloomberg: The multi-millionaire founder of Twynam Agricultural Group lost $1 million in an email fraud, a London court heard Thursday. The British man who facilitated the theft says he's a victim too. John Kahlbetzer, who is on the Forbes list of the 50 richest Australians, lost the money when fraudsters tricked the administrator of his personal finances into transferring it to them, his court papers say. Fraudsters emailed Christine Campbell, pretending to be the 87-year-old and asking her to pay $1 million to an account held by a British man, David Aldridge, which she did. Kahlbetzer is suing Aldridge to recover the funds, but Aldridge says he was being "unwittingly used" and was himself the victim of a fraud involving a woman he met online and believed he was in a loving relationship with. Email frauds where companies' staff are tricked into transferring money are a growing problem. U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics show "business email compromise" cases, where criminals ask company officials to transfer funds, have cost more than $3 billion since 2015.
Somebody attempted this with an organization for which I administrate a website. They got the Treasurer's email from the site and spoofed the President's email address, asking for the current account balances. Fortunately, the Treasurer wrote to the group's secretary and asked her to handle the request. When she called the President about it, he said he had no idea what she was talking about. Scam never sleeps.
Sounds like whoever he outsourced his financial management to is in trouble...
It's interesting that so many of these scams involve massive wire transfers of funds. Wire transfers aren't too common for individuals in the US, but from what I understand it's the equivalent of handing over a bag of cash to the recipient. If the funds are taken out of the account, there's no way to get it back. Why would anyone, businesses included, rely on such an irrevocable form of payment? I can understand shady international payments to Cayman Islands bank accounts or spy agencies moving money around secretly, but normal everyday transactions? Why no safeguards?
It won't hurt him much, and it's a small step in the opposite direction of the general trend of all money being concentrated in the hand of the few.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
It is high time the Government investigate if there is a pattern of getting instruction through email and transferring money without asking questions to allow the rich guy deniability. Scenario like this: Rich guy hires goons to do stuff, sends email to financial advisor cryptically pay x $ to account Y. Financial advisor deliberately avoids getting any written instruction, phone calls, oral verification. Even if the police catch the perps, sniff up the money trail of the goons, it would stop at this "financial advisor". Who would again claim victim of fraud.
They should find ALL the money transfers by that accountant, and see if any of it can be tied to funding illegal activity.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You missed the important fraud part. Criminal claims to be someone else for purpose of deception. The idiot that didn't verify the request should be slapped with negligence as well, it's their ONE JOB.
The word is stupidity.
Probably the "girlfriend" said "My uncle is sending a million bucks. Half for you half for me. He'll write it all to you. Then please put half in my account." Well this would seem unbelievable until a million dollar wire transfer showed up along with a card that said "Hope you enjoy the gift." This a really interesting way to take advantage of a third party. Typically you don't necessarily expect a scam when being *given* money.
Even if all of this is true, they still don't *deserve* to be victims.
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Mr. Kahlbetzer's net worth is estimated to be between 750 million USD and 950 million meaning this loss represents 0.105% to 0.133% of his total wealth.
If your net worth was $500K, would you shrug being scammed out of $500?
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I certainly wouldn't lose any sleep over it.
I have seen something similar, but much closer to home.
A friend of mine started dating a single mom, who lived and worked in the same city as him. She used his affection for her to motivate him to spend very recklessly on her needs, including straight-up giving her cash to help with bill payments and such. Her demand for money kept rising, and when he finally said that he needed to roll his spending back, she dumped him flat.
My point is that dating is dangerous, especially for adults with money. Your emotions will ruin your ability to think rationally, and will motivate you to make ridiculous levels of self-sacrifice for people you trust not because they have earned your trust, but because you wish that they were trustworthy.
People tell me I am cynical. But I have seen this with my own eyes. If you have money and must date, the best thing you can do is keep the details of your wealth secret. If it keeps coming up in conversation, dump the one you are with and keep looking.
Did I miss the part of the article where Mr. Kahlbetzer complained about losing sleep?
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Bad in math? ...
You are off by some orders of magnitude, or don't know what the % means
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You'd think after the first few hundred million, they'd reach a point where internally they'd be thinking "you know what? I'm rich enough now. I can let this go."
I'm not rich but I'd still get pissed off by losing 0.1% of my money to a trick, whether that 01.% was $1 or £10. Like I'd get pissed off at someone beating me at a game of Scrabble if they did it by cheating, and that is worth even less in money terms.
It's their social duty to track down the criminal and see that he's prosecuted. Otherwise they'll find new victims.
"Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff."
Working on anti-spam products, I see some of the most amazing things.
There are dozens of "spoof person A in email to person B to get something valuable" variations. Money, W2 forms, anything.
A recent favorite is to compromise someone's email. Keep monitoring their email, and when some financial transaction is about to happen, forge an email as if it were from the party receiving the money, to the sender of the money, saying "Oh, because reasons, our bank account had to change, send the money to ...."
The forged email has the whole legitimate back-and-forth conversation about the transaction quoted, just as if it were a genuine reply.
If the figures given above are correct he could have it happen once a month and it'd be less than the risk free rate of return by about an order of magnitude.
In plain English, he makes more than that in interest, unless he has it all stuffed under the mattress.
So no, he wouldn't end up in the poor house.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So what happens when a genuine seller gets payment in advance, ships the goods, and then the buyer rolls back the transaction?
What if everybody starts rolling back transactions willy-nilly?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You're mostly right. But then again there was an article posted here, maybe a year back,about "Business at the speed of trust". It was all about cutting bureaucracy and red tape and just gettin' 'er done and other gung-ho number-one stuff like that.
People, especially those that fly a lot, read stuff like that and it makes their point hair stand up with excitement.
IIRC it was posted a week after a story about how some major corp got scammed because someone didn't do all that bureaucracy shit.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So what happens when a genuine seller gets payment in advance, ships the goods, and then the buyer rolls back the transaction?
What if everybody starts rolling back transactions willy-nilly?
Then the banks start charging 3% transaction fees so they can include "free fraud protection" like the credit card companies do. I am sure they would be happy to do so...
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
And businesses will tell them to fuck off.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."