Dubai: A Dubai firm has lost $53,000 (Dh194,700) after a cybercriminal hacked its email and then used a spoofed email to trick its client to wire the funds into an overseas bank.
Binu Manaf, CEO-cum-managing director of Cheers Exhibition in Al Quoz 2, said the money was intended to pay for an exhibition stand they had built for the upcoming GITEX event in Dubai.
“This is not a crude phishing attack, but one which involves a high level of sophistication,” said the Indian expat.
Manaf said he didn’t realise their email account had been hacked until one of his clients enquired if he had sent out emails seeking payments into an overseas account instead of a local bank in Dubai.
“That set the alarm bells ringing because we hadn’t sent out any such email,” recalled Manaf. “As it turned out, our email had been hacked. Unknown to us, a cybercriminal had been scouring through all our correspondence containing details of ongoing contracts and outstanding payments,” he said.
Binu Manaf, CEO, Managing director, Cheers Exhibitions located in Al Quoz 2, Dubai“Once the fraudster had familiarised himself with our business operations, he impersonated our company by creating a spoofed email address that looked deceptively similar to our email,” said Manaf, showing email trails where the letter ‘i’ in the company’s actual email [email protected] had been cleverly replaced with the letter ‘l’.
Using the manipulated [email protected] email, the fraudster then contacted several of Cheers’ clients and instructed them to make payments to Nordea Bank headquartered in Finland.
“Since the difference in the emails was not apparent to the naked eye, a Russian client fe ..
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