Hi everyone,
So I'd like to precede this by saying I already feel absolutely horrible. I feel like throwing up constantly just thinking about this, but thought I would put it out there to see if anyone in the OzBargain community might have had any similar experiences or any advice.
Long story short, it appears a scammer hacked either my conveyancer's or the other side's conveyancers email accounts. and from doing so, got my details as well as the details of my upcoming property settlement. They knew the amounts due in terms of stamp duty payments etc, as well as the dates these amounts were due. They created a near identical email account to my Conveyancer, who I was emailing around 5-10 times a day and so simply didn't notice anything out of the ordinary when I received the scammer's email. It popped up only with my Conveyancer's name and the email address didn't come up as 'new sender' or anything. I know that I should have checked the email address before doing anything, but I had just answered about 3 other emails from my Conveyancer and still had about 3 to go. I had 6 emails in a row from her on different matters and it didn't at all enter my mind that 1 of these 6 might not be like the others.
In short, I transferred nearly $100K at the direction of this scammer who I believed to be my Conveyancer to the account they directed in the email. I called the Conveyancer later that afternoon to discuss another matter, and mentioned to her I had transferred the stamp duty payment for this property. It was then we both realised what had happened.
I searched the BSB and realised it was a Bank X account. I called Bank Y first (my bank) to ask them to commence a scam investigation and try recover the funds immediately. They advised the funds had already reached the other account but they opened the Scam investigation immediately. I then went to Bank X and tried to have them freeze the account the funds were received into. They said the account was already closed and for some reason, they couldn't see any details in the system about who had opened or closed it (how is that possible?). That night, I attended the Police Station and filed a fraud/scam report.
I now have the Conveyancer's insurer, the Police and Bank Y/Bank X working on this case but I'm accepting the worst and not expecting to get anything back. In the off chance anyone here might have had similar experiences and have any advice, I thought I'd raise it to the OzB community. Again, please don't pile on me. I know and I feel horrible. I've barely been able to sleep and I am just hoping there may be some avenue I haven't thought of, even if its not likely to succeed.
Thanks in advance everyone
Mod: Edited for privacy
Hello, I work in IT and I have worked with a company that had this exact thing happen.
Are they using Office365 if they are they should immediately enable Microsoft 2fa on all their accounts as well as change their passwords.
However, this may not be all, in some cases hackers will use a redirect rule to redirect directly to them - but this does not show up in new version of Outlook.
They need to logon to https://outlook.office365.com/mail/login.html and then go to the rules area and delete any rules that are in their.
If they are using exchange they need to go to their OWA portal.
If they are using exchange chances are they are breached by the latest exchange hack and need to update and patch immediately https://cyber.dhs.gov/ed/21-02/.