Small business owners are ripe targets for scam artists. A simple yet effective Scam to Target Small-Business Owners — bogus bills.
Small-business owners are very busy people, and scam artists know this makes them good targets. An old fraud targeting busy business owners has been making a comeback as of late. The scam couldn’t be simpler: Fraudsters send fake invoices to small-business owners and hope that they’ll just pay it without verifying whether it’s genuine or not. The perpetrators play the odds and only need a small percentage of targets to fall for the fraud for them to make a profit.
The invoices tend to be for generic and non-descript services that would commonly take place at a business like a telephone repair charge, copier maintenance or some other service. The amounts also tend to be relatively low and realistic so they won’t raise too many red flags. Business owners should be careful to ensure that all paid invoices are matched with purchase orders or at least reviewed by someone at the company before being paid.
About Mike Periu
Mike is a seasoned executive with experience in small business finance and management. He is the founder of Proximo, LLC a leading provider of corporate, consumer and small business education and training services with an emphasis on finance and technology.
Mike Periu is also a leading national voice for individual empowerment through financial education and entrepreneurship. He has been interviewed over 500 times in national and international media, including NBC, Univision, CNN en español, Telemundo, HITN, TVE, RTE, SBS, MegaTV and others.
Mike writes regularly for American Express OpenForum, Yahoo! Finanzas and is a Huffington Post contributor.
Mike has degrees in Finance and International Business from Georgetown University. He is on the Board of Directors of the Council for Economic Education and was a Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation’s Labs for Enterprise Creation.
