Interview with Gerard Morada about cybercrime, email scams, hacking and digital fraud

In the past decade, we handled quite a few cybercrime cases where the culprits aim to establish fraudulent fund transfers. They usually succeed by hacking email accounts, taking over the email correspondence without the parties’ knowledge and give instruction to pay the funds to a bank account that is controlled by the criminals themselves. If the scam is discovered at an early stage and the funds are transferred to a bank account in Hong Kong (also happens if the case has further nothing to do with HK), it is key to immediately inform the local police. Together with the bank, the Joint Financial Intelligence Unit can freeze the bank account and try to retrace the funds (but in many cases, the money is already gone…). The victim should also inform the police at their place of business, the involved banks, the party on the other side, do their own (IT) investigation if possible and stop using the hacked email accounts. Please be warned that these scammers work very diligently: they take over the email correspondence for quite a while, call the victim and impersonate an existing person with an unsuspicious telephone number displayed, pretend to be a bank associate who helps with a (real) software update, convince the victim by using details only known by the inner circle, produce fake invoices and so on. They also have the most advanced equipment and published information show that the number of cases are rising unfortunately which means that these scammers have access to more funds to finance their activities. For this podcast I invited Mr. Gerard Morada to share his experience as a criminal law litigator in these kind of email scam cases. As a Hong Kong lawyer he was able to retrieve some funds recently for a mutual client. We also talk about the variations, the prevention and the way to handle if the victim finds out about the fraud in the hope to warn as many people as possible. You can find Gerard Morada on his firm's website: http://www.mcalai.com

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