F IDI N E WS AFFILIATES WARNED TO TAKE ACTION ON PHISHING FIDI Affiliates have been urged to safeguard against phishing attacks, after senior industry staff were targeted by scammers F IDI has issued an urgent call to its Affiliates to ensure they protect themselves from online phishing scams targeting businesses or senior individuals in the moving industry, following serious attacks on at least two Affiliates since April. Phishing is the criminal practice of sending emails pretending to be from authentic companies or people, usually to extract passwords, credit card numbers or money. While early scams were easy to recognise, typically featuring poor spelling and design, scammers are becoming more sophisticated, targeting company heads and 16 FF307 September-November 22 pp16-17 FIDI News.indd 16 other high-profile people with extremely convincing approaches. BOARD PHISHING Incoming FIDI Board member Gordon Bell was victim to one such whale-phishing (targeting high-level personnel) attack, during which he lost a significant sum of money. Shortly after returning from the FIDI Conference, Bell received a friendly-sounding email claiming to be from FIDI President Laura Ganon, with the subject brief task. The email asked for his help sourcing Amazon vouchers for staff on behalf of the FIDI President. The email came from a Gmail account, different from Ganons usual address. Bell queried the address, but says he had no reason to doubt that he was dealing with Ganon herself. She replied that this was her private email and, because of complications with her company server and it being the weekend she could only use this, says Bell. I thought nothing of it. I wanted to pull out all the stops just to make sure she got what she wanted in record time. The next email asked Bell to buy 10 Amazon 200 vouchers on her behalf, which he did exchanging several more emails with Laura on the process. Having spent 2,000 on the vouchers, he sent the serial numbers and got an email back confirming receipt. Three days later, Bell had an email asking for a further favour. I received another email from Laura telling me she found out that she was terribly short of vouchers and asking me if I could purchase another 10, he said. But she also asked if I had a Bitcoin account, as this was another way to send an incentive. The second request rang alarms and Bell sent an email to Lauras company address to ask if the emails were actually from her. Of course, the answer was no, says Bell. I literally cried. I preach awareness of scams to our offices what a fool I had been. I wanted so desperately to find this person, to expose them, but it was too late. I lost 2,000 when all that was on my mind was to please my President. FIDI AS A TARGET FIDI itself has also been targeted recently, with fraudulent emails WWW. F I D I . OR G 05/09/2022 16:46