By Michelle Crean

Killarney Gardaí are warning local businesses to be vigilant when receiving emails – due to a sophisticated online payment fraud currently doing the rounds.

The Invoice Redirection Fraud, otherwise known as Business Email Compromise, appears to be from current suppliers requesting that they make all future payments to a new bank account.

However, businesses only discover the fraud sometime afterwards when the legitimate company sending the invoice queries ‘non-payment’.

Both small and large companies have been targeted, a garda spokesperson told the Killarney Advertiser.
“Very sophisticated companies have fallen for the scam and lost extremely large sums of money in the process.”
Fraudsters will impersonate an existing supplier for example there may be a dot or hyphen removed or inserted to make the fraudster’s email address look almost identical to the legitimate email address of the supplier.

“Killarney Gardaí are advising business owners to always make phone contact with your supplier and establish that the email received originated from them before sending any payments to a new bank account. This fraud is becoming more and more prevalent and any business that believes they may have fallen victim to this fraud are asked to contact Killarney Gardaí.”