Police are investigating a new case of online fraud involving the theft of 105,000 euros. The perpetrators defrauded a company in Limassol by sending a fraudulent email and managed to obtain the large sum of money.
The case was reported today to the Limassol Criminal Investigation Department by a representative of the Limassol-based company. According to the report, last July, the company agreed to purchase products from a partner supplier based abroad.
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On August 17, the company in Cyprus received an email —an email that appeared to have been sent by the partner company and to which an invoice was attached regarding the order of the products. Through the fraudulent email and invoice, the recipient was asked to pay the sum of 105,000 euros via wire transfer to a bank account whose details were listed in the fraudulent email.
Following the instructions in the message it had received, the complainant company proceeded on August 25 to pay the amount via wire transfer to the bank account indicated to it by the fraudsters.
Today, September 14, when the Cypriot company contacted its partner company, it was determined that the message had been sent by fraudsters and that the bank account to which the transfer was made does not belong to the partner company.
The Financial Crime Investigation Office of the Limassol CID is investigating the case.
In light of this new fraud case, the Police recommend that, in cases where such messages are received requesting payment of sums of money, citizens should verify the messages by contacting the recipients of the payment via telephone. For this communication, a phone number should be used that the two parties have previously used to contact each other or that is listed in messages exchanged between them during previous transactions.
Company owners or managers are urged to inform their staff about this specific type of fraud and to implement procedures to verify the payment requests they receive.
