Guidelines for Companies Making International Foreign Currency Payments

If your company effects foreign currency payments, it is essential to be aware of a common type of fraud targeting companies conducting such transactions.

The fraud involves CHANGING THE ACCOUNT NUMBER to which payments are supposedly to be made to a certain foreign partner.

The account number change may be announced, often via a fake letter seemingly from the foreign partner, but the account number can also be changed without prior notice in the payment instructions (invoice) itself.

If the change is announced by letter or otherwise, the forged account number change is usually presented as temporary, where not only the bank but also the country of the “new” recipient’s account has been altered.

In all cases of ACCOUNT NUMBER CHANGES FOR FOREIGN PARTNERS, you must act with extreme caution and ALWAYS VERIFY and confirm the change directly with the foreign partner.

We emphasize that a change in the foreign partner’s account number may indicate that the email correspondence with the foreign partner has been compromised or manipulated, so confirmation should never be done solely via email or by calling a phone number provided in the email.

Additional verification and confirmation with the foreign partner should at least follow these recommendations:  

- Conduct verification by phone using apreviously verified phone number, preferably with a known contact person. 

- You need to call the foreign partner; they should not call you. 

- It is recommended that the phone verification be followed by a confirmation email sent by you to the foreign partner, to which you should receive a reply. 

- In email communication, perform basic checks on messages received from the foreign partner to ensure the correspondence is truly exchanged with the partner and not a third party involved in the fraud.  

For more information and advice, please contact your corporate relationship manager at our bank.