With the holiday season approaching and management figures increasingly away from their desks, small firms face a growing threat of being cheated. Businesses here are being inundated with "pseudo requests, spurious invoices and sham deliveries" from a range of Irish and internationally based fraudsters, according to the Irish Small and Medium Enterprises Association (Isme).
Fraudsters are becoming more cunning and daring, says chief executive Mark Fielding. One new scam involves the monitoring of deliveries to offices by fraudsters waiting in cars nearby. The conman waits a few minutes and then dials reception to say that the wrong shipment has been made. They then collect the shipment from reception promising to replace the order with the correct one the next day.
The new scams come on the back of well-established ones such as the infamous Nigerian letters, offering to share the proceeds of hot money with those willing to supply access to their bank accounts.
More recent scams have involved so-called "phishing" where e-mail recipients are fooled into thinking that their bank has contacted them and asked them to submit their passwords onto a website.
One of the more common scams in recent years has involved charging people for entries in internet directories or city guides. People are misled into thinking that the entry is free, but the small print commits them to paying for inclusion if they sign the form.
ComReg, the telecommunications regulator, was forced to take action 18 months ago to crack down on phone-based scams that were affecting businesses and consumers.
The regulator forced telecommunications operators and internet service providers to block calls to 13 countries, mainly in the South Pacific islands. The perpetrators of these scams took advantage of the fact that many users did not realise that their internet dial-up settings had been fraudulently changed to international premium charge numbers until exorbitant bills arrived from their service providers. One business subscriber incurred charges of €12,000.
Poor control systems and embarrassment at being caught out are the main reason fraudsters continue to prey on smaller businesses. Larger businesses generally have more structured procurement systems and tighter levels of IT security.
The advice from Isme is to check all incoming forms and invoices thoroughly, especially those coming from abroad or from unknown suppliers and to ensure that all signatories in the company are fully briefed of possible dangers.
In the case of bogus directory entries, Fielding says he knows of no instance where a business has been taken to court for nonpayment, so he advises business caught out to hold firm and not pay up.
