Don’t waste even a second; the moment you realize you are a victim of a fraud attempt, you should immediately start the money-back process from ‘SWIFT recall.’ The less time you take to start the process, the more chances you get your money back from ‘Money mulling’ fraud. Here is how you can get money back from wire transfer.
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Steps to get money back from a wire transfer
The following steps do not confirm that you’ll get your money back, but by following these steps, your chances of getting your money back are increased. You need to ensure that you start following steps as soon as you realize a fraud has happened.
Step 1: Immediately ask your bank to start ‘SWIFT recall’
● Call your bank, tell them about the fraudulent call you made, and request them to initiate a ‘SWIFT recall.’
● Make sure you have all the information handy when you contact the bank. Information will include the details about the bank you transferred your money
● Now contact the fraud department of the recipient bank and ask them to freeze the funds in the receiver’s account immediately
● In case funds have already been moved out to the next bank, you’ll need the bank’s assistance to find out the next receiver bank and freeze all further accounts, wherever your money went
● Along the process, make a list of all the banks who received the money in the chain, as you’ll need this information later to get your money back from the wire transfer.
Step 2: Go to the FBI and file a complaint with Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)
● The FBI will ask for the details about the transaction, the victim, and the scam itself. To be more specific, you can add details about the links you clicked and phishing emails you witnessed along the process
● One complaint is filed, you will get an IC3 number, keep it safe, and use it in the next step
Note: Filing a complaint with the FBI is enough if you are lucky enough to get the recovery sooner. In any case, you should complete the remaining steps to increase the chances of funds recovery. Also, don’t forget that the FBI has tons of complaints daily, so you have to keep up with them regularly for continuous investigations by them.
Step 3: Submit your IC3 number at your local FBI field to get your money back from wire transfer
● Find out your local FBI field. Now contact the financial or cybercrimes in charge. Please give them your contact and IC3 complaint number information.
● Contact legal counsel and decide if an injunctive order is required if you are an enterprise. If yes, then send orders to the involved banks. This will make sure that those fraudulent accounts can no longer transfer the funds in the future.
Step 4: Contact every bank that may have received your money
● Reach out to every bank that has received your money in the chain. Ask each bank to initiate ‘SWIFT recall’ and ‘Fraud freeze’ on the receiver’s account
● Banks will ask you about the details of fraudulent accounts so that they can identify the account and transaction. Once those accounts are frozen, confirm with those banks about the period of freeze and the protocol of initiation of the SWIFT recall
● In the worst case, if money has been transferred to the fourth bank, you’ll have to repeat the above mentioned steps. To simplify the process, you ask your first bank to initiate and send a SWIFT recall to every other bank in the chain.
● Do not stop until all the banks that received your money are frozen, and the SWIFT recall protocol is in process
● Don’t forget to note down the following details, including the time of the call, the number you have used to communicate with the bank, their email address, and the direct contact number
● If you have a business or are an enterprise, contact your insurance provider for professional liability coverage, omissions coverage, cyber loss coverage, or cybersecurity to get your money back from a wire transfer.
Step 5: File a police report and contact your local authorities
Now you should contact the local authorities and file a complaint with the police. Please provide them with all the information they need about the police report, incident, and contact numbers.
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Step 6: Initiate the ‘Information kill chain’ with the help of the IT department, security team, and consultant
In your final step, involve your IT team, and ask them to act on an incident response plan. If you don’t have an incident plan, you should do this.
● Request your security team to prepare an image of the system for forensic use. In any case, do not try to change anything on your own on your system so that the security team can see everything as the attack happened
● You may need a clean loaner system to execute business on a temporary email address
● Now you need to identify the root of where the breach happened. It is mostly from Business Email Compromise, meaning the hackers have targeted your email to enter your system. The rest of the mystery is how?
● In some rare and serious cases, hackers may have installed malware on your network or machine with information related to your email or other credentials. In any of the above cases, you need to figure out quickly and eliminate the threat as soon as possible before you face any further threat from hacker
● Once warranted, forensic investigators will dispatch from various sources to investigate the whole incident.
Importance of knowing steps beforehand
If you know the whole process beforehand, you won’t waste your time on unnecessary worry or heat and trial to deal with the situation. It’s better to create an internal system so that immediate action against fraud can be executed quickly. Do not miss out on any of the FBI field offices, your bank, legal counsel, your network security team, and your insurance company to maximize the chance of fraud recovery. That’s how to get money back from wire transfer.
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