[Slartibreakfast]

It's good to see a business sharing stories of having been scammed - a lot of times start-ups are so involved in the process of growing the business and making sales that they forget to remember to train their sales team to have good operational security.

A start-up that I worked for got taken for over $100K by a scam artist who, believe it or not, used a picture of a famous middle-eastern leader on a fake driver license to open an account - I'm not kidding. The guy was instantly recognizable from any recent TV news story, and yet the scam artist pasted that picture onto a drivers license (that had otherwise legit information on it) and faxed that in when he opened an account. After opening the account, the scam artist then filed a change of address, which shifted the shipping destination from a swanky neighborhood full of mansions (where the scam artist had stolen an identity from) to a dilapidated building in a really bad part of town. The operations team didn't catch any of this, and shipped the merchandise.

They were only able to get the feds to catch the guy when he showed up and tried to pull off a second heist a few months later.

[noonespecial]

I suspect the photo was a kind of test to see if the target was asleep at the wheel. If the photo had been instantly recognized, the scammer would have simply moved on in search of softer targets.

[Slartibreakfast]

The irony of it was that they already had a whale on the hook. The person whose identity that they had stolen was someone with an incredible net worth. They actually had direct access to his bank account and funded the account on our side with an ACH transfer. The bank reversed the transfer once the guy figured out his account had been hit, but by then it was too late on our side and the goods had already gone out the door.

I have no idea why they used that picture - they took a template driver license, populated it with the guy's personal information, pasted the picture on it, then faxed it to us. I suppose they figured it would be so grainy from the fax that it wouldn't be obvious, or maybe they just did it for the lulz.

[Zuider]

It is a kind of reverse Pons Asinorum.