SMEs lost almost €19 million in email related scams over last two years

Ellen O'Donoghue

Small and medium sized business have lost close to €19 million in the last two years in email-related scams.

Each business lost an average of €22,000.

Banking and Payments Federation Ireland figures have shown that while 67 per cent of SMEs were targeted by a scam in the last 12 months, more than half don't have any specific fraud awareness guidelines or training programmes in place.

Niamh Davenport, head of financial crime at the BPFI, told Newstalk that scams are evolving all the time.

It’s really sophisticated scams that we’re looking at... gone are the days where you might see a typo in an email or something like this," she said.

Some scams "are very clever, they’re quite simple, and we might miss some of the red flags," she added.

Invoice redirection and CEO impersonation scams remain the top fraud risks to businesses.

The figures come as the Government launches Fraud SMART SME in an effort to tackle the problem.

"So we’re looking at €22,000 average loss, which is a huge impact on any small or medium sized business to lose that much money, and the really surprising one for me was actually that, we talk about fraud all the time, it’s in the news on a daily basis, but in the survey, 53 per cent of those surveyed said that they do not have specific fraud awareness training or programmes in place," Davenport said.