I paid the money – now what?
• Gather all documentation regarding the transaction and emails/invoices received and report the incident as soon as possible to your local police.
• Immediately alert your bank to the fraudulent transaction. The bank should immediately try to re-call the funds.
• Consider consulting a civil lawyer in the country where the money was deposited into the beneficiary bank account. This might be of help to address the bank in trying to recover the money and/or launch a civil complaint regarding the account holder.
Protect your emails from hacking attempts:
• Make sure that your email accounts are well protected and don’t share the passwords.
• Don’t click on attachments or links you aren’t expecting, even if they have innocuous sounding names (invoice, for example). They often contain malware giving access to monitor your email/computer activities.
• Be vigilant of suspicious or unexpected ‘urgent’ payment requests or changes
• Look carefully at the sender’s email address. Criminals often create an account with a very similar email address.
• If you receive an email concerning a change of payment method or bank account, contact the payment recipient through another channel (phone) to verify this claim. Don’t reply directly to the email.
• Verify the authenticity of websites before providing any personal or sensitive information.
Avoid becoming a target of scammers an hackers:
• Don’t post sensitive or personal information on social media. This can be used by fraudsters to target you.
• Shred all confidential documents and dispose of them properly.
• Use different passwords for every account, change them regularly and enable two-factor authentication on all your accounts whenever possible.
• Use strong passwords which include numbers, symbols, capital and lower-case letters.
Hints Courtesy: South African Police Service