What to do if your friends receive email messages from your email id & name, to transfer some money into a unknown persons account ?

What to do if your friends receive email messages from your email id & name, to transfer some money into a unknown persons account ?

I saw this urgent message today from a friend's Facebook page : 

I am producing here as general awareness is important . while flagging out names and identities of persons to save their identities as case is under investigation.

“Hi All, Please go thru this msg seriously as it happened with me two days before and I want each one of you to be aware of it”

“My name is abc and I have a factory in bbb,  My accounts head hhh received a mail from my email ID saying that I need to transfer some urgent money to a person. So please send the details which are required to transfer the money. He thought that since this mail has come from me, immediately sent a standard format which asks for details like name, account number and bank details. He did not have any doubt since the mail was addressed to him with his name hhh and my full name – ABC was mentioned in the signature in the mail (my email ID is abc@mailserver.domain.in and no one can know my full name just from my email ID) 

Within 10 minutes he got a reply giving all the details and asking for an amount of Rs RRR to be transferred. The money was to be transferred to someone by name of NAME having his accounts in kkk bank, ccc branch. Since the mail came from my email ID, my accounts head did not have any doubt, but before transferring the money he called me to find out if this money needed to be transferred from my personal account or company account. I was shocked to know as I had not sent any such mail. That time I was in factory only. I immediately rushed to his seat and to my horror there were mails from my ID. I checked on the server if someone had hacked my password and was sending mails directly from server. But there was no mail being sent from the server.

I immediately contacted my IT consultant who handles our website and when he checked he found out that these mails were coming from some other email ID from Africa, but what was seen on the screen was my ID. 

To investigate further I sent one of my accounts person to kkk bank ccc branch to find out about this account in which payment had to be transferred. They informed that this is about a month old account and many such transactions have taken place where money is coming and going out from this account. They also told that this type of fraud is specially happening with people who are in exports import business as their mails go throughout the world thru different servers. 

I decided to inform this episode to our association President – Mr GGG and on his advice we have even informed the Police. He has promised to pursue this matter and get the account blocked of that person NAME in kkk bank and also further investigate to find out the culprit. 

What surprises me is that the hackers knew that I am the person who is the decision maker in our company and hhh is our accounts head. We have more than nn email IDs in our company. It means that the hacker would have gone thru all these mails to figure out who are the right persons whose ID he can use to get this money.

I would request all of you to be cautious of sending online payment requests by email and if you are sending then put a system in place where there is a double check through phone.”

An examination of the case suggests that it could be an insider’s job. Someone who may have known abc and hhh the acounts head. The fraudster was an expert and used name aliases in email (unfortunately this is very easy to do in email.. you can change the senders name and id -- what appears to the recipient). But immediately on seeing the subject of transfer money to NAME  you should have checked the details of the email.. that’s how your IT Consultant found out and through reverse DNS he could see the email was from an IP address in Africa with of course the alias names of abc and hhh.. the insider could be a person working in the email service provider, the bank or even in abc’s office. But One thing you can try to pre-empt this kind of problem in enabling the 2 factor authentication. I am an IT Consultant providing help in areas of Info Security, Project Management, and Process Excellence. I have helped clients in such kind of frauds - Pl contact me through my website https://aniloberai.blogspot.in/