Business Email Compromise

Security & Fraud Awareness Tips: Business Email Compromise

Business Email Compromise (BEC) is one of the most financially devastating cybercrimes, mostly because of the widespread reliance on email for both personal and professional communications.

In a BEC scam, a criminal may send an email that appears to come from a known source making a legitimate request. For example, scammers can pose as your CEO looking for an urgent answer, or the title company of your house sending new wire instructions.

Top 5 Tips to Protect Yourself and Your Business from a BEC Scam:

Be careful with what information you share online or on social media. By publicly sharing details such as pet names, schools you’ve attended, family connections and your birthday, you could be providing scammers with the information they need to guess your password or bypass security questions.
Don’t click on anything in an unsolicited email or text message asking you to update or verify account information. Look up the company’s phone number separately and call to ask if the request is legitimate.
Carefully examine the email address, URL and spelling used in any correspondence. Scammers use slight differences to trick your eye and gain your trust. (e.g., meridianbanks.com, paypall.com, gooogle.com)
Be careful what you download. Never open an email attachment from someone you don’t know and be wary of email attachments forwarded to you.
Set up multifactor authentication (MFA) on all available systems. MFA requires users to present more information than just a password, making it a strong safeguard against hackers and fraud.

For business banking customers, Meridian offers Positive Pay to prevent check or ACH fraud.

Upload a list of checks or ACH’s for matching to control unauthorized activity. If a payment presented doesn’t match what is on your list, you’ll decide if you want to pay or return it. If you’re interested in setting up Positive Pay for your business, fill out the form below to get started.