Phisher dupes Conde Nast out of $8 million with just one email

finextra.com

11 points·freejoe76··5 comments

Why was the Secret Service involved?

The Secret Service was originally created to investigate counterfeiting. While the role has mostly shifted focus to protecting the President, it still investigates financial crimes.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secret_Service

In addition to the Presidential protection mission (added later, after Lincoln), the Secret Service's original function was as Treasury police -- to prevent counterfeiters, financial fraud, etc. Until 2003, they were actually part of the Department of the Treasury, not DHS.

Reddit should try this to get some extra funding for another developer.

Nice to see that ballsy phishing/social engineering tactics are still in play. I am reminded of the famous deposit slip scam...

http://www.snopes.com/business/bank/deposit.asp

Not sure why this is such a big deal. A human made an error, and I'm sure in Conde Nast's case 8 million dollars isn't that big of a deal. It was probably one of many transactions with that many zeros coming and going that day.

The bigger news is that the guy that did it opened the account in the US and kept the money there? I can't fault some random accounting person for being duped in that manner, but one would expect the criminal to be a bit smarter.

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