Email Scammer Pretends To Be The CEO And Convinces Company Employee To Transfer Them £100,000

So the scam emails do work after all.

Ayoub

• Published in Interesting
• June 3, 2022

Honestly, it seems as though human beings have been scamming each other since the dawn of time. It requires less physical effort than stealing, and it's easier to get away with.

Scammers are getting increasingly sophisticated in their attempts; they use the tools at their disposal to deceive people and are constantly improving their methods. Once con artists discovered the potential of the digital world, they built a whole empire dedicated to scamming people online and stealing their life savings.

Nowadays, scam attempts are mainly initiated either through email or phone calls. These scammers know exactly who to target, and they usually focus on the portion of the population that isn't that tech-savvy, so they easily fall for their tricks.

Each country is doing its best to put an end to these scams, but it's still never enough since most of them are from different corners of the world.

A Redditor who goes by the username u/100KFuckUp made a post on the r/tifu subReddit where he explained how he fell for a scam email that convinced him the CEO wanted £100,000 transferred to him. Scroll down and read the full Reddit post and scroll a little further to check out screenshots of comments from the original post.

Here's the original post by u/100KFuckUp:

The user eventually deleted their account.

Luckily, another Redditor saved the content of the post and shared it once again on r/BestofRedditorUpdates:

OP messed up multiple times and made sure to point out every single one of them.

Once OP and the CEO spoke on the phone, it became clear that he messed up.

OP got suspended until they investigated the case further.

OP then added a few edits to update us on their situation:

And finally, OP made the last edit and revealed what ended up happening to them.

Here's how Reddit users reacted to u/100KFuckUp's situation:

I did not know it was that easy to pull off.

This user did the exact opposite and saved his company from a world of trouble.

There’s a reason they have a PIN and physical device to approve payments.

This is obviously the real CEO, unlike the person that scammed OP.

Someone's email must have gotten compromised.

It's almost like watching a scary movie.

This was a good lesson for the organization.

You always wonder how anyone could fall for this, and someone eventually does.

Calling first would've be the smart thing to do.

They put you under pressure so that you won't have time to think.

And three people have to turn a key at the same time.

Not even a phone call before confirming the payment?

They make the mail look as realistic as possible.

Authorised Push Payment fraud (APP)

You don't make the best decisions under pressure.

The CFO breached the safety protocol.

OP replied to the previous user's comment to clarify some things:

The company should get organized to avoid things like this.

People online never stop trolling.

You can never be too sure.

Your wording sounds scamy, sorry.

They do intensive research before attempting anything.

It could happen to anyone of us.

Scammers are getting smarter and better by the day; people are catching up to their scamming methods, so they always feel forced to come up with something new. That makes it harder for people to spot a scam email, so something of the same nature could happen to any one of us.

Ayoub