14 DAY TRIAL // Wells Fargo, the world renowned bank, fell for a plot cleverly designed by a skilled social engineer and wired him the sum of $2.1 million (1.5 million EUR) to a bank account in Hong Kong without questioning his identity too much.
According to Forbes, the hospital chain Catholic Healthcare West (CHW) whose escrow account was maintained by Wells Fargo turned out to be the victim in this case.
The $7.5 million (5.25 million EUR) CHW had in the account was safe until December 6 when a fax arrived at Wells requesting that $445.000 (311,000 EUR) be transferred to an account at HSBC under the name of HUGE International T. Ltd.
Since HSBC didn’t have such an account, the transfer failed. This happened once again on December 14 when another fax requested the delivery of the same sum of money to a Hong Kong bank to the company HUGE International T. Ltd.
The HUGE scam didn’t work, so on December 19 the crooks sent a fax to Wells asking them to transfer close to $1 million (700,000 EUR) to the accounts of Textil Trading UK Limited at the Standard Chartered Bank HK Ltd. in Hong Kong.
Because this transfer worked like a charm, the fraudsters returned with another request, this time for $2.9 million (2 million EUR) to the same account. The operation would have required the sale of securities and since the bank didn’t receive any specifications on which securities to sell, the transfer was not processed.
The next day, the final request was for the transfer of $1.1 million, which was wired without too much hesitation by Wells Fargo to the same Textil Trading account in Hong Kong.
You may wonder how the fraudster managed to convince the financial institution to wire the money without questioning the reasons for which a hospital chain would send money to a company’s accounts in Hong Kong.
It turns out that a few months before the scam, CHW moved the $7.5 million (5.25 million EUR) from WestAmerica Bank to Wells Fargo.
Merced County, which required CHW to maintain the sum in an escrow account, published a copy of the escrow agreement on its public website so that the county’s board of supervisors could approve the transfer.
The agreement made public contained the signatures of Merced County director of public health Tammy Chandler and CHW CFO Michael Blaszyk, signatures which were later copied and pasted to the phony faxes sent to Wells Fargo.
Bank representatives state that they’re currently collaborating with law enforcement on trying to recover the money from the Hong Kong account, if anything is left of it.