London: Maritime businesses should be vigilant for fraudulent emails altering the bank details of recipients for payment transactions, the International Transport Intermediaries Club (ITIC) has warned.
The tactic has been used in a number of different frauds across the wider marine industry, ITIC said today, such as in the diversion of ship agents’ disbursement accounts.
Ship managers have been targeted too, with payments for ships’ chandlers and master payments to ships’ agents being diverted.
Scam artists are sending these fraudulent emails from addresses that are only slightly different to the genuine ones, sometimes with only a single letter omitted, which makes them hard to spot, ITIC says.
ITIC tells Splash that its assureds, predominantly port agents and shipbrokers, have seen an uptick in incidents of fraud recently.
“ITIC advises members that they should regard any message changing account details with suspicion and to take steps to independently verify the instructions,” the club said today.
“In this way, a shipbroker managed to avoid an attempt to divert monthly hire payments by questioning the request to forward funds by telephoning the owner’s accounts department to check the request was genuine.”
If in doubt, use an alternative channel of communication to verify suspect emails, “or at the very least re-enter the email address copied from a message known to be genuine”, ITIC advises.
