Orion SA says scammers conned company out of $60 million Luxembourg-based chemicals and manufacturing giant Orion SA is telling US regulators that it will lose out on around $60 million after it was targeted by a criminal wire fraud scheme. The description of the incident taken from the company's Form 8-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) suggests that it …
Scammer 1: "We need a new trick, nobody falls for the Nigerian Prince scam any more, even though we offer them huge sums of money"
Scammer 2: "Now just a thought, how about we stop offering them anything and just tell them to replace a major vendor's bank details in their system with ours so we get the money instead of the proper people?"
Scammer 1"WTF? What idiot is going to fall for that, next thing you will be suggesting we invent our own currency that doesn't actually exist anywhere except in a block of data on someone else's computer - or even start telling people we have invented artificial intelligence by renaming predictive texting to LLM so we can charge for it"
Scammer 2: "You're right, sorry, let's go back to kidnapping and piracy, we could make THOUSANDS of dollars a year doing that!!"
Just as likely is an impersonation of some senior member of staff telling some junior member to transfer money because of some big deal. There was a report somewhere (not, I think, here) of Ferrari dodging an extremely good fake at very high level (boss to one step down) because he said he'd have to verify, what was the book they'd been discussing the other day? I think that was improvised but it does need to be laid down that very firmly and from the very top that any instruction to transfer large amounts of money outside of standard business procedures need to be verified by some back channel if the instruction is not given face to face, no matter how senior the "instructor" is and how junior the instructee. And that "because I say so" should never be accepted as verification.
Every day my businesses usually get at least three or four of these kinds of scam emails.
But there are two important differences between my businesses and multi-billion dollar businesses like the subject of this article:
1. The amounts of money my businesses handle are much smaller.
2. In the final analysis, it's all my money.
So I guess that's why nobody's ever scammed my businesses out of anything.
Unless you count the Tax Man, who has unjustifiably enriched himself at my expense on more than one occasion, but with amounts too small to spend the rest of my life chasing.
Oh, and the energy companies, who routinely steal money directly from my bank accounts on the pretext of "estimated use" despite the fact that they know perfectly well that the use will be nothing like as high as their "estimates".
Oh, except for Scottish Power - who have been threatening me with legal action ever since I fired them in December 2021. I said "Please go ahead, I'll make you look very silly in Court". So instead of suing me, they keep selling their imaginary "debt" to different debt collection companies (I suppose it's easier than actually doing something worth-while for a living) who get the same response from me.
What I'm saying is that scammers are everyfuckingwhere, it isn't always obvious who they are, and you need eyes in the back of your head. I'd flog them.
Very late one Friday afternoon, looking forward to going home and the boss rings me. Not a person to call me for trivia I answered and he explained that we'd been the victim of a fraud and could I help as I was the only person in IT who worked that kind of ticket.
I asked how much of a loss we were looking at. He came back with a VERY large number. I'm not normally a sweary person but I did loudly utter a colourful expletive before sinking back into my cubicle as everyone was staring at me..
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