Fraudsters exploit agents' trust

AGENTS are increasingly
vulnerable to fraud that
exploits the trust they have
with corporate clients. It
begins with a client referral
and ends in the agency being
bled dry.
In 2014, a Johannesburg
agency lost almost R2 million
in four days at the hands of
fraudsters. After the incident,
the agency was more vigilant
and avoided a similar attack
last month.
In the 2014 fraud, the
agency received a referral
from a corporate client asking
its travel agent to help one
of the corporate’s foreign
branches with travel bookings.
The corporate’s PA had
forwarded an email to the
agency that she had received
from a fraudster who was
pretending to come from the
client’s London branch.
The email said the branch’s
travel desk was “offline” for
the next month and they
needed someone to book
and co-ordinate their travel
for the next few days. Trusting
its client, the agency obliged
and started to book tickets.
The bookings were spread
across several airlines and
were mostly business-class
tickets on flights from Nigeria
to Atlanta, Johannesburg and
Frankfurt.
The fraudsters used multiple
credit cards during the
booking process. “This guy
had 15-20 different credit
cards that he gave us for the
air tickets,” said one of the
agency’s directors.
After the client’s cards
kept being declined, the
consultants became
suspicious.
“We then looked into his
email domain only to find out
it was registered to a home
in Pretoria and not in the UK
as he claimed.” The client
had even created a fake
LinkedIn account with all the
company’s information.
The agency was able to
recoup only R700 000 of the
R1,8m in losses incurred from
airline ticket bookings. Due
to the cost of investigating
further, the agency chose
not to pursue it. “It cost us
probably another R70 000
to get people to look into it
and in the end we decided we
couldn’t afford this.”
The agency received a
similar email on October 6
saying that the company’s
travel desk was “undergoing
maintenance and upgrading
for the month”. After some
quick fact-checking, the
agency spotted the fraud
attempt and immediately
warned its consultants to
ignore requests from the
fraudster.