If you've ever wondered why online scams continue to appear in the news, it's because they are so lucrative. How lucrative? Over $300 million is being earned every month in the US alone by email scammers.
As The Register reports, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), is a department of the US Treasury focused on safegurading the financial system from illicit use, combating money laundering, and promoting national security using the financial authorities. Part of the agency's job is collecting information on suspicious activities and presenting the findings in a report each year.
The 2018 report (PDF) shows that email scammers are doing extremely well, generating at least $301 million every single month within the US. Most of that comes from sending out fraudulent vendor and client invoices, with manufacturing and construction businesses being the main target. Other popular methods of extracting money include compromising business email accounts and impersonating members of a management team including the CEO.
Although FinCEN exists to combat such fraud, the scammers are clearly winning as FinCEN has only managed to stop around $500 million worth of scams, so a little under two-months of income for the scammers.
The only way to stop email scams being so effective is through education of the employees who deal with the emails and authorize/transfer the money. If they know how to check the legitimacy of a request, then the money would never make it into the hands of these criminals. Based on how much money scammers are making every month, we clearly have a long way to go on the education front.
