Tag: upfront payment

As Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) increasingly migrate to digital channels, fraudsters have taken advantage of the opportunity to revive the old Advanced Fee Fraud (419 scam), duping businesses to make upfront payments for good and services, without the intention to deliver, or pay sums of monies, in advance, to facilitate the payment of loans or promised funds. 

The pandemic forced everyone to spend more time online than they did before. This was out of necessity because of remote working and the need to buy services and products online. A global collective of highly sophisticated networks of criminals are aware of this larger, captive online audience, and they have innovated and stepped up both the frequency and the complexity of their attacks.

Investment and financial fraud is on the rise across the world. Each day thousands of people are conned out of their hard-earned money by scams that have increasingly become sophisticated. There are dozens of ways scammers use to gain access to people’s accounts, often masquerading as being from financial institutions.