By Neville Chaney
Cyber scams have a great deal in common with aging. You may not be old now, but you will be. Likewise, if you haven’t been a target of cyber scams, it’s simply a matter of “when.”
I don’t know if “cyber” was even a word when I started my career, but in our everyday work environment IT departments, business owners, and much of the population is fearful of providing an “open door” to their information. We must remain diligent so that you and your customers will not be affected by the criminal attempts to gain access to key information that can open the door to network security, account information, or even personal data.
Some of the most recent examples are as follows:
- A cyber criminal impersonates your business by email.
- He contacts your customers.
- Instructs your customers to change how they pay you.
This request would not necessarily be alarming – right? If a cyber scammer can guess a user’s email address and password, he can use your name and actual email account without you even knowing! They can set up an email rule for a specific customer to a folder into your email account and correspond to the customer as “you” from “your” email address without you even being aware until it’s too late.
Some scammers are sending out emails that appear to originate from your address. Using this subterfuge, they then ask you to reroute your payments to an ACH account that can easily accept your money, leaving you the victim of another scam.
So, what do we do? Well, one policy worth implementing is a notice to customers that directs them to put in a verification call should they ever receive any change in payment instructions, no matter how authentic it may appear to be. Imagine that you had a wonderful, loyal customer who paid their bill, but it was to a scammer. What would you do? Tell the customer that it’s their fault? “Eat” the payment and try to keep the customer?
It’s better that you have given them a warning and have made them aware. This is a battle that we will be fighting years from now, but one that we can be winning with constant diligence and education.