The cybercriminal community spends a lot of time developing scams to make sure their target falls for them. In the latest scam, a state Supreme Court judge was tricked into an email scam she believed came from a legitimate real estate lawyer. Resultantly she lost more than $1 million.
The judge in the discussion is Lori Sattler, a 51-year-old Acting State Supreme Court Justice who was in the process of selling her apartment to buy another one. But what she didn’t expect was getting scammed in such a critical situation.
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According to NYDailyNews report, Sattler called on the law enforcement authorities and alerted about the scam. She told police that on Friday, June 7th she received an email from someone pretending to be her lawyer asking her to send money to a bank account.
Following the instruction, she wired $1,057,500 to the bank account however rather than her lawyer the money was sent to a bank in China, reportedly Commerce Bank of China.
At the time of publishing this article, the matter was under investigation.
Moral of the story is that no matter how high profile your job is if you are not aware of online scams you may end up losing your life earnings. This is not the first time when an email scam has successfully tricked users into wiring money. In 2016, a company’s chief financial officer was tricked into transferring $44.6 million to the wrong bank account.
However, don’t be surprised since email and phishing scam are not only unsuspecting users but also tech giants. In fact, Facebook and Google were targeted by a phishing scam by a man in Lithuania who tricked the tech giants into paying him over a $100 million.
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