City suffers from a half a million dollar computer scam.

Crime 100By Staff

June 14th, 2019

BURLINGTON, ON

 

It took more than a month to tell the story but at least they went public with a computer scam that cost the city more than half a million dollars.

ID theft screenThe city got stung by a scam that fooled a staff member into transferring funds to the account of a company they had done business with in the past.

The scam was based on an email asking to have banking information changed.

With that information the thief was inside the city system.

It took a week for the loss to become evident – bank was called, police notified but the money is gone and once it is out the door there is no getting it back.

Was it sloppy on the part of the staff member? A little perhaps – but it is very very difficult to stay on top of the attempts to get at your money.

The Gazette was hacked earlier this week. In our case someone got at us by getting inside the server that our site runs from.

Our readers are still not able to comment on news stories.

We live in a different world and have to learn think differently.

The senior people at city hall in the Finance and IT departments will be devastated – some lessons will be learned and procedures will be tightened.

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