In our practice, we are increasingly confronted with cybercrimes or attempts to commit them. This time we faced a very carefully thought-out and planned fraud, the victim of which was our international client. In addition, as far as it involved an international transaction, the entire case was subject to ???????? French law.
Fortunately, with experts in new technology and the French legal system on board, our team was able to act quickly and comprehensively. As a result, according to the relevant court decision, almost EUR 700,000 that our client could have lost has already been returned to their bank account.
How did the fraudsters operate? In short, they pretended to be our client’s long-term business partners. They set up false e-mail addresses, which differed from the originals by one character. This created the illusion to the decision makers at our client’s company that they were actually contacting the partner’s sales management and employees. A series of fraudulent e-mails were subsequently sent from these false email addresses. Their content indicated a change in the contractor’s bank details. As a result, the fraudsters convinced our client’s company to pay invoices to the false bank account.
In this case, the precision and attention to detail shown by the fraudsters are particularly surprising. The content of the fake messages included the context of the business relationship between the partners and information about orders awaiting payment. Furthermore, the fraudsters copied the exact appearance of the e-mail footers and other graphic elements of the contractor. The fraudsters operated in two independent groups – one sold the companies’ data, and the other defrauded the companies’ funds. This and the fact that the targets of the attacks were several companies operating internationally and in different industries made the case extremely complicated and in addition to legal work, also required a lot of organizational and logistical work.
From a legal point of view, the challenge lay in obtaining access to the case files during the investigation before the court proceedings, since the case was complicated and targeted many international companies. Therefore, it was necessary to obtain testimony from representatives of many foreign companies. In addition, the fraudsters filed every possible legal complaint, so the case files circulated through many authorities. Nevertheless, our lawyers have managed to cope with this challenge thanks to constantly having their finger on the pulse and finally, they obtained access to the case files in their entirety. Our lawyers also supported the Polish authorities in contacting the French authorities and coordinating the exchange of documents and witness testimonies between them, which made it possible to significantly speed up the course of the proceedings and thus our client’s recovery of the funds.
The actions of fraudsters are becoming increasingly sophisticated. This time a fraudulent strategy was based on a deliberate combination of technological knowledge and psychological tricks. No wonder, then, that quite a few people and companies (after all, companies are people too) are becoming their victims. The only thing left for us lawyers to do is to intervene immediately when something like this happens (God forbid) to our client and to do everything possible to recover the defrauded funds.
