‘Don’t issue money transfer orders via email’

The cyber crime police has issued a warning to multi-national companies (MNCs), asking them not to issue orders for financial transactions over emails. This warning, sources say, comes in the backdrop of recent cases wherein employees had received mails from their bosses asking them to transfer huge amounts of money to certain accounts but, when investigated, these mails were found to be a scam.

The warning issued by the Mumbai police mentions that recently a new trend has been noticed in online scams. “There have been cases which have come to our notice wherein the chief financial officer of the company (CFO) receives a mail citing details of an account and that a huge amount needs to be deposited in the said account at the earliest. This mail is sent from the official work ID of the chief executive officer (CEO), the owner or one of the top bosses in the company and marked crucial and urgent,” explained a cyber cell officer. “The mails ask money to be transferred via national electronic funds transfer (NEFT) or real-time gross settlement systems (RTGS) which are online modes of money transfer.”

He added that the CFO would, in most cases, approve of the transaction and transfer huge amounts of money to the said account. “These accounts were bogus ones run by scamsters and the next day the CFO and CEO would realise what had happened. Many companies have lost crores in certain incidents,” he added.

Keeping this in mind, the cyber cell decided to issue warning to all companies and industries, asking them to be careful. “We have asked the CEOs and owners to not issue orders for money transactions via email and to only call employees for any such matters. We have also asked them to ask their employees to call the bank to verify details of the mentioned accounts and names of account holders and also inform the cyber police immediately so we can trace the mail and arrest the accused,” the officer added.