19 June 2019 Matt Sisson, Projects and Membership Manager
A gentle reminder to anyone involved in processing invoices and payments to ensure you are correctly following your institution’s policies and procedures. We’ve been alerted to a number of recent fraud attempts where fraudsters have issued false bank detail changes to divert payments for construction companies working on campus. In each case these have been picked up by the institution by making a phone call to the company to check. Simple, but easy to ignore.
Similarly, it’s about this time each year when there’s a mysterious spike in attempts to catch HEIs out by phishing for self-service payroll access. You should require face-to-face contact, or at least a phone call, before approving any staff bank detail changes.
Remember that you can post details of any attempted frauds – successful or not – on the Counter-fraud discussion boards, to alert colleagues at other HEIs. If you’d like to post anonymously, just tick the anonymous box.