14 DAY TRIAL // Condé Nast, the company publishing Wired, Vogue, The New Yorker, QC, Glamour, Vanity Fair, and many other magazines and websites, was scammed out of $8 million with a single well crafted email.
The swindler registered a company called Quad Graph, a name that is similar to that of Quad/Graphics, the firm handling all printing for Condé Nast.
He then opened a bank account and sent an email to the publisher's accounting department asking for Quad/Graphics' payment information to be updated.
The email included a payments authorization form which the company's staff signed and faxed it back without noticing the name discrepancy.
As a result, between November 17 and December 30, Condé Nast made payments of $8 million to Quad Graph until the real printing firm enquired about outstanding bills.
According to Wired, the publisher's bank, JPMorgan Chase, managed to reverse one transfer of $36,000 and the rest were found sitting in the rogue company's account, except for $84,000 which the swindler had already transferred to his personal account.
The suspected scammer is one Andy Surface, 57, of Alvin, Texas, who registered the Quad Graph company in his name. The firm's funds were frozen on January 10 and Condé Nast filed a forfeiture lawsuit last week to retrieve them.
Mr. Surface has not yet been charged with any crime in connection with this scam, but Forbes reports that he had previous run-ins with the law.
The payment hijacking technique used in this case is not new. Back in August three Kenyan nationals were sentenced to prison after stealing $3.4 million from the governments of West Virginia, Kansas, Ohio and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in a similar manner.
This type of scam was also been spotted in other countries. In September, it was revealed that African fraudsters managed to trick the employees at South Lanarkshire Council in Scotland to pay £102,000 to a rogue account by impersonating a legitimate supplier.