A current case from the district of Munich shows that not only old people fall for scams on the phone – keyword “grandchild trick” – but also managers. There, last Thursday, an executive at an electronics company received a call from an unidentified man posing as the CEO of the Japan-based parent company, police said on Tuesday. Since the caller used the parent company’s number, the clerk assumed he was talking to the actual CEO.
According to the police, the alleged supervisor gave a story that the employee could understand during the telephone call, according to which the company headquarters needed immediate financial support from the company in the Munich district. The employee was given an account address to which several hundred thousand euros were to be transferred. The branch manager arranged for this immediately via the company’s accounting department. Only afterwards did he have doubts, which is why he reported the incident to the police station in Trudering.
The officials immediately informed Commissariat 77, which is responsible for white-collar crime, which arranged for an immediate seizure of the assets in the recipient country via the Financial Crime Unit at Interpol. Because it was night at the time of the transfer, quick intervention prevented the recipient’s account from being credited and the amount from being withdrawn before the start of the day. Investigations into the perpetrators and the phone number they used are still ongoing.
The Munich police warn of the scam that goes by the name “CEO Fraud”. With this method, the perpetrators first collect information about companies in order to then pretend to be CEOs and get employees to transfer a larger amount of money to domestic or foreign accounts. Contact is usually made via e-mail, as the most recent case from the district shows, but also – always brazen – by telephone. According to the fraud victim, the voice of the real manager sounded deceptively similar.