A racket of swindlers has made a number of attempts to steal money from western buyers through breaching email information of Bangladesh’s readymade garment exporters. Three RMG exporters have recently informed the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association that their email information had been breached and the buyers were asked to divert payment to different accounts. In the cases, the fraudsters used email addresses that were almost identical to those of the exporters. They changed a single letter in the addresses to cheat the buyers. Following such attempts to steal money by cheating, the BGMEA asked all its members to remain alert against deceptive emails. Five to six months ago, Space Sweater Ltd got an email that asked for payment confirmation along with bank account number that did not belong to the company. They checked it and found that the internet protocol address of the email belonged to a foreign country. ‘We usually send a confirmation email against all documents sent and payment. The hacker used almost the same email address, changing a single letter,’ Iqbal Hamid Quraishi, a director of the company, told New Age on Monday. ‘After the fraud attempt, I requested my buyer to stop making payment,’ he said. Iqbal said that swindlers sent the email from the US to one of his Netherlands’ buyers and instructed to divert payment to another account. ‘It did not result in any financial loss as we had requested the buyer to stop making payment within a very short time,’ he said. Iqbal, also a director of the BGMEA, said that two more member factories had for informed the trade body that they faced such incidents but they had also managed to escape financial losses. Following the incidents, the BGMEA requested all its members to check details of email correspondence related to payment and remain aware about digital forgery, he said.
