Comment by jerf
7 years ago
I'm sure there was plenty of this sort of fraud occurring in the 1950s and such, but technology has enabled this sort of thing a lot lately. Not quite the same but closely related, the "email from the 'CEO' explaining why you need to wire money to this numeric account" is a huge and very profitable scam right now. That stunt may have been possible 50 years ago, but modern scale, tools like LinkedIn making it easy to target the employees that might have that authority, etc. make it all way easier. Oblivious companies get burned quickly nowadays.
In the late 80s or early 90s I was interviewing for a data entry job at General Motors, and was told that they were getting burned frequently by blindly paying incoming invoices for goods or services that were never provided. I was surprised a scam that simple would be so effective.