Not only lonely singles searching for love on the Internet or users who launch all *.exe files sent by strangers suffer from cyber fraud. As it turns out, even corporate financial professionals can be swindled: Scoular Company from Nebraska lost $17.2 million in an email scam, for example.

One of the senior employees at the privately owned commodities trader that was established 120 years agosend the money to a Chinese bank 3 times, acting on instructions received in emails from fake addresses. The messages received by the corporate controller appeared to have come from the CEO of the company and its auditing firm. However, in fact they were sent from different (fake) addresses by the scammers.

According to the FBI, the first email told the employee to wire $780,000 to a genuine Chinese bank. The following day another instruction for money transfer was received, and the third one 3 days later. The first instructions were saying that the wire transfers were needed for a secret acquisition of a Chinese company and swore the employee to secrecy. The following message created an illusion of legitimacy by telling the corporate controller to contact an auditing firm for details of where to send the money, and another email was received that appeared to be from that “firm”.

The employee admitted thathe wasn’t suspicious of the wire transfer requests, because the CEO of the company did consider expanding in China. In addition, the fake email addresses seemed to be genuine, and real people who also seemed to be genuine auditors answered the phone number provided in the emails.

The FBI found out that the scammers used email addresses originating from Germany, France and Israel and servers based in Moscow. Scoular Company said it had not been affected by the loss whilehad to accept that it could be difficult to recover the funds.Anyway, the FBI was attempting to do so. So, the person who suffered most from the scam was the company controller, who was immediately fired for negligence.