Two days is all it took for Interpol to recover more than $40 million worth of stolen funds in a recent business email compromise heist, the international cop shop said this week.
Cybercrims capitalized on the knowledge that the victim business worked with the supplier in question and asked that the next payment made to it was sent to a new account based in Timor-Leste. The email address from which that request came was slightly misspelled but was convincing enough to trick the employee into sending the funds anyway.
Regardless, the country's local police force assisted their Singaporean and Interpol counterparts, locating and intercepting $39 million from the scammers' bank account. Seven arrests were also made following the intervention, which in turn led to the discovery of more than $2 million in additional funds.