Fraud by fake CEOs explodes
€30.000 is the median gain when someone who pretends to be a company’s CEO initiates a fraudulent payment, according to Swedish numbers. The phenomenon has grown rapidly.
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Stressful e-mails from the alleged CEO, to hurry an employee to perform a large payment to a foreign bank account. This is the typical anatomy of the ever-more common CEO fraud, according to an overview article by Sweden’s business daily Dagens Industri. (Article behind paywall, in Swedish.)
From only five cases reported in Sweden in 2015, the number grew to 3.000 in 2017 – a level at which it stayed in 2018.
Big misses
The paper quotes Jan Olsson, investigator with the national IT crime center of Sweden’s police, saying the outcome varies from around €20.000 to €16 million in the last years. The median outcome in the Swedish cases was €30.000.
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In a Norwegian case, fraudsters came across nearly €60 million.