Impersonation Fraud Makes Inroads In The UK

Though it may be late payments that grab headlines in the U.K., the fact remains that small and mid-sized entities also have to grapple with fraud. Among those struggles is dealing with impersonation fraud, or business email compromise scams. By now, the process may seem familiar. Fraudsters impersonate a trusted email account, supplier, or business relationship in order to dupe companies to part with their funds.

A Lloyd’s Bank survey estimates that impersonation fraud touches 500,000 businesses and costs them an average of £27,000. This fraud, too, is up 58 percent year-over-year. Only 20 percent of those hit by fraud “think twice” about reconsidering and re-examining business requests and 37 percent say they have no security precautions in place.

Those who might consider themselves tech savvy are not impervious to the scams. Of the 1,500 SME professionals surveyed, 12 percent of millennials have been preyed upon by impersonation fraud, or know someone who has.

Other types of fraud are also gaining traction. As we note in this week’s report, ghost employees, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, can — and have — been haunting firms. No mere specter, they can wreak thousands (in some cases millions) of dollars worth of havoc to a company.

Ghost employees are either dead people living on via the corporate world’s payroll, former employees that are still alive or employees that never were — they are still getting paid in all of these cases.