CEO falls for email scam, loses $47 million
An airplane parts manufacturer has fired its CEO after the poor guy got scammed, costing the company €42 million ($47 million).
"In the supervisory board meeting, held on May 24, 2016, Mr. Walter Stephan (CEO) was revoked by the supervisory board as chairman of the management board of FACC AG with immediate effect for important reason. The supervisory board came to the conclusion, that Mr. Walter Stephan has severely violated his duties, in particular in relation to the 'Fake President Incident'. Mr. Robert Machtlinger was appointed as interim CEO of FACC AG".
The 'Fake President Incident' the announcement is referring to is a very popular scamming method among cyber-crooks. It is also called CEO Fraud incident, Bogus Boss, or Whale Incident. In it, a scammer contacts either an employee with access to finances, or the CEO himself, asking for an urgent and secret transaction of a large sum of money. Sometimes, the scammer says the finances will be used to acquire a competing company, which is why everything must be kept secret.
The company did not disclose more details about how the scam actually took place.
Softpedia reported how in February, the company’s CFO also got fired.
FACC managed to recover some €10.9 million of the stolen funds (£8.31m), but the rest seems to be scattered across banks in Slovakia and Asia. Just a couple of days later, a bank in Belgium also announced it got scammed for €70 million (£53.35m) in the same fashion.
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