If you believe that your business has been the subject of a scam or fraud, you need to take action to:
- stop the fraud continuing
- discover the extent of the damage
- clean up the results of the fraud
The exact course of action will depend on the nature of the fraud, and you will need to take specific advice from the police or legal advisors, but the following are typical things to do or consider:
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Inform the police. The local police may want to involve other forces. There is a National Hi-Tech Crime Unit that may be relevant to some forms of fraud. Take guidance from the police on which, if any, of these subsequent actions should be taken.
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Check bank accounts for unexplained transactions.
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Do a credit check on your business – these are relatively inexpensive and may help to pick up unexpected changes in your business’ credit condition.
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Be particularly careful in making future payments – ensure that these are for goods and services you have actually received.
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If the scam involved penetrating your IT systems or you think that information from these systems might have been used, then the systems themselves may still be compromised. Unless you have particularly good internal IT security expertise, you should consider hiring an IT security specialist to investigate and, if necessary, rebuild or replace parts of your IT infrastructure.
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Prevention is far better than cure. The consequences of a scam can take a lot of time to clear up and they can threaten your business’ viability. See our guide on keeping your systems and data secure. (Elcapitalino)