The growing sophistication of scams

As financial planners, we get in touch with you periodically to discuss your financial planning arrangements.

For many, this will be a very familiar experience and it’s easy to assume that any communications you receive regarding your financial plan are indeed from your financial planner.

It’s easy to lower your guard and not question any communications you receive. As such, it’s important to stay diligent when receiving communications by email as this is a perfect opportunity for someone to take advantage and defraud you from your hard-earned money.

Recent cases

I've read a couple of articles recently where investors have been unfortunate enough to have their emails hacked without realising.

In one case I read about, a link had been clicked and the individual input personal details into what they thought was a legitimate website but was in fact fake. Many people use the same password for multiple logins and, now that the hacker had access to their emails, they were able to find previous correspondence from their financial planner and used AI (Artificial Intelligence) to create a fake email in the same style and appearing as though it was from said financial planner.

Naturally, this is very sophisticated and makes spotting these hacking/fraud attempts even harder, as the correspondence you receive now reads the same as you’re used to and could even have the same signature, sign offs and footers.

The email had set out recommendations for the investor to use their ISA Allowance and to make payment to bank details provided in the body of the email. Believing it was genuine, the client attempted to make payment on a number of occasions but their bank rejected the payment. This prompted the client to contact their financial planner stating that they couldn’t make payment, to which the financial planner of course said 'what payment?'. This is when it clicked that the request was fraudulent.

Our approach

At SG Wealth Management, we’ve taken steps to ensure that our clients don’t fall foul of these attempts and, whilst we’ll share bank details of where payment is to be made, these will not be disclosed openly in the body of an email. If we send them electronically, they’ll be sent in a document that’s password protected with the password being confirmed verbally or shared via our secure online portal.