Norway among world’s top targets for email fraud

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Frequent use of temporary workers makes the summer the high season for “director fraud”. Only the USA, Australia and the UK are more prone to this kind of fraud than Norway.

 

“We have high prosperity and high trust in each other and public institutions.
This makes us a little gullible, and several surveys show that we are quite naive.This makes us particularly attractive to fraudsters,” said Karianne Myrvold,Marketing and Communications Manager at Trend Micro, the data security company, to NRK news.

Myrvold explained that director fraud affects a person claiming to be the management of a company, and targets people in, for example, the finance department to make them pay large amounts of money.

By the end of May, the municipality of Stavanger was scammed for 500,000 kroner when an employee transferred money to an account after receiving an email from a person they believed to be a general manager in the municipality.

The Micro Trend revealed 4,000 such attacks worldwide during the first four months of 2018, 3% of which took place in Norway, according to NRK.The data security company estimates that this year, we will be scammed for NOK 90 billion this year.

Økokrim boss, Trond Eirik Schea, told NRK that it is difficult to get the money back after transfer, and emphasised the importance of preventive work.

Myrvold therefore asked people to be aware of words such as “contract”, “acquisition”,”confidentiality” and “haste” when they read emails.

“The purpose is to make employees feel time-pressured, and make them avoid common procedures,” she said.

 

© NTB scanpix / #Norway Today