Ingram Micro draws partner attention to influx of spurious customer orders

In a letter sent to its partners, Ingram Micro has drawn attention to the fact that fraudulent sales orders are on the rise. The company has also offered practical advice that will help mitigate the risks from such orders. Here is the advisory Ingram Micro sent out.

Dear valued Ingram Micro partner,

Please be aware and take action: Fraudulent sales orders are on the rise. As our channel partner, we would like to share practical advice that will help mitigate this behaviour to protect our company, your company, and your clients. We’re seeing instances of fraud experienced by our partners from their long-term Existing customers who have had their email breached as well as from new customers that are 100% fraudulent.

To help your company and your employees identify and stop what may be fraud, we would like to share the following advice.

Your new customers

If an order comes in from a new customer, is unsolicited, and seems too good to be true, then it probably is. Other potential fraud signals that we’ve seen from the frontlines include:

• If the new customer is pressed for time and okay with any price you give them.
• If the customer is ordering something that is not your core area of focus.
• If the new customer wants you to overnight a large order with no concern for cost.

If you suspect a fraudulent order from a new customer, what should you do?

• As a best practice, perform an internet search on the company name and check their email address against the known company domain.
• Google Earth any address given to you as a “ship-to” and see the locations and its surroundings. Warehouses in desolate areas or nondescript office parks and freight forwarder addresses are all common ship-to addresses for scammers. They have been known to transpose street numbers or zip code numbers on their ship-to location to look very similar to actual end user addresses.

Your existing customers

Your existing customers can be and are being breached as well. The bad guys are getting into their email systems and creating PO’s on company letterhead which can look perfectly legitimate, especially when it is sent directly from a valid email address from a known customer. And watch for abnormal purchases. Is your managed security client with 50 employees, sending you a PO for 150 users?

If you suspect a fraudulent order from an existing customer what should you do?

• Check the email address sent to you for the request carefully. A common trick is when an email address has one character off from the actual company or entity domain name or will use a .net instead of .com or .org.
• Check if the ship-to location is different than the location you usually ship to, eg, a different city, a completely different address or an unlikely address for that company or entity.
• Perform an internet search on the company and check the domain website against the domain email address.
• Pick up the phone and call your client to verify.
• Take a quick inventory. If the existing customer is buying unusual product than what they typically purchase and are buying in fairly extraordinary quantities, STOP and call them via the phone number YOU have on file for them, not the one in the email sent to you with the request.

For our relationship

Sometimes, the scammers are sliding into our daily conversation of Ingram Micro & Partners. We have been witnessing recently few cases where a fraudulent email was received by our partner from Ingram Micro usual contacts with apparent usual email address.

We issued recently a warning about Business Email Compromise in which we repeated among others that you need to: i) verify all email addresses of your received emails ii) contact the sender if it is known to you via other mean or with one-to-one email iii) do not proceed to any payment to a pretended newly changed Ingram Micro bank account. We usually, communicate and request acknowledgement in several ways in case we change bank account.

Fraud isn’t as easy to spot as it used to be. Scammers are getting better and more sophisticated. At Ingram Micro we are continually training our team to spot potential fraud and to contact you directly to confirm if there is any doubt.

Let’s work together to eliminate fraudulent orders.

Signed,

Marc Kassis, Director, Cyber Security Division, Middle East, Turkey and Africa at Ingram Micro.