Scams : Danger from disgruntled employees or vendors ...

cebudragonlady

With the Internet and faxes come scams. We get e-mails and faxes from supposed countries in Africa, asking us to send our company bank account and routing numbers. Obviously, this is a scam, designed to drain company bank accounts. What is to stop a disgruntled employee or disgruntled vendor from sending a company's bank's account and routing number to these scamsters? - resulting in major problems for owners and workers. This is something that I worry about - as other people should too !!! Have any of you folks out there come across this, or have any ideas as to PREVENTIVE steps that can be taken ?

Thanks,
Charito

Don D

Depends on the level of sophistication of your company's finance transaction and wire process. Here it takes two employees, one being either the Controller or the VP of Finance to digitally 'co-sign' the transaction requested by, say, an accountant. They have these little 'Star Wars' looking Digipass things about the size of a pager. Each authorized employee has a secret password that must be accurately keyed and in return the little digital wizard gives them a secret code for the transaction. Fairly complicated to steal from for sure. We use it almost daily for wire transfers and to fund payroll at a moment's notice. Otherwise our payroll account has a zero balance always. I'm told that if a company had no more than a checkbook system of funding accounts, probably one of these characters posing as the third son of the deceased wealthy potentate of Zackzuba, who promises to put 40 billion in your company account, could call the bank and pose as you and ask that a few dollars be transferred. Keep in mind that the bank would be responsible for making it good just as they would for honoring a fraudulent check. It would take more than a disgruntled employee to pull it off though. I thought we were the only one who got these regular faxes asking for account numbers. Our policy requires that whoever pulls one of these off the fax is required to immediately give it to HR. I collect them and send them to the Attorney General periodically. He papers his wall with them I suppose.