Brickbat: Caught a Big One

The city of Memphis, Tennessee, lost $773,000 in a phishing scam in 2022, but officials did not disclose the loss until a local media outlet asked about it recently. The city was making regular payments to a local construction company. "Following a request from who they believed to be Zellner Construction, they changed the account details and wired $773k to an account that was, indeed, not Zellner," city media affairs manager Arlenia Cole said in a statement. Officials said that by the time they discovered the error the time period to reclaim the money had expired.

Comments

[Commenter_XY]

...but officials did not disclose the loss until a local media outlet asked about it...

Ah the wonders of urban 'blue' conclaves in a 'red' state. Who got the email and changed the account details? Seems like a pretty basic question.

[Don't look at me!]

But crime is down !

[Mother's Lament]

Idiotic point trying to make this political. Ignorance of social engineering scams knows no demographic boundaries.
Look at reason reporting what was most likely a BEC or straight social engineering scam call it a phishing attack, which it most definitely wasn't. At least they didn't say they were hacked...

[MatthewSlyfield]

Recent phishing awareness training by my employer actually makes the point that even cybersecurity experts can have an off day or be rushed by a deadline and fall victim to one of these scams.

[Brandybuck]

The idea that "red" enclaves are somehow immune to this, is absolute bullshit. People of all political stripes are gullible to scams, willing to believe anything if it fits their narrative, and ripe for social engineering. This was a phishing attack. What happened is that they did not check the URL of the link they clicked through. To suggest only "blue" people are susceptible to this is such utter arrogance.

[Fist of Etiquette]

I wonder which city official got that $773k.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

Hey, it's not like that $773,000 belonged to anyone.

[Brandybuck]

> Officials said that by the time they discovered the error the time period to reclaim the money had expired.

There is no time limit to scams. They were gone with the money five minutes later. Sounds like officials are even more clueless than normal.

Reminds me of my mother. Years after she got scammed out of hundreds of thousands, she's still trying to contact the scammers to pay back her "debt" with them.

As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, this is NOT a partisan issue. A Trump regime would not have changed anything. Anyone can get scammed. All it takes is a belief that too-good-to-be-true is actually true. But in this case not even a scam, but impersonation. Meaning never trust your emails even when it comes from your own contractor.

The real issue here is not reporting it.