Scammers Send Fake Invoices While Bosses Are Away
from the pay-up dept
Apparently, the new popular scam in Europe these days is to send companies fake invoices for accessing internet "directories." The scammers are hoping that with so many people on vacation over the summer, people won't check around carefully, and will simply cut checks. The amounts usually aren't all that high, either, making it less likely that an accounts payable person will carefully check over the invoice. Isn't this why companies use purchase order systems?
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Who's got deeper pockets?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
This is pretty common.
- fake domain registrars who send you a bill. You don't want your domain to vanish so (not realising that these guys have nothing to do with that at all) you pay up!
Fake copyright registrars — ditto.- Small office supply invoices for copier paper and the like. These are often so small that someone can approve them without a cosignature; they try to send them to a secretary (who doesn't want to bother the boss over something so small and thinks that it was something ordered and shipped) or A/P who again, they hope, figures that its so small that the paperwork was overlooked, and hell, the company always needs copier paper, right?
Sometimes there are interesting variations. For example the domain registrar can actually be "slamming" you.Or the trademark guy can actually be promising to send you a copy of your publication in the federal register (by being a "trademark notification service" that "tracks registration of your mark" -- i.e. they send you your own paperwork back). The latter case can get them around the fraud statutes. In fact an earlier employer was scammed this way.
Since I approve everything in writing at my company, much to people's annoyance, I catch these things before they go out.
[ link to this | view in thread ]