Jacolene van der Merwe from itraveltheworld / itravelafrica, recently received an email from one of their suppliers with a seemingly innocent request.

“This supplier is based in Kenya and we have been dealing with them for years. In the email, Joseph (the owner) requested that we pay one of his South African suppliers and deduct the funds from our future bookings. Of course, we don’t have a problem with this kind of request and so agreed to go ahead with it.”

Jacolene explains that she then asked for the supplier’s invoice to keep on record for itraveltheworld’s accounting purposes. This turned out to be the best thing that she could have done.

“Once he sent me the invoice with Escarpment Lodge details, I realised that something was not right. Why would a Tanzanian lodge want to receive payment into a South African bank account? On top of which the bank account provided appeared to be a personal account.”

Jacolene decided to follow her gut instinct and called Joseph. “He was shocked – he was not aware of the email at all. We discovered that someone had hacked into his email account and was sending emails in his name.”

Jacolene advised Joseph to contact the hacker’s bank and attempt to lay a charge of fraud against the account holder.

Her vigilance allowed her to expose the scam, keeping both itraveltheworld and its supplier safe. She urges other operators to remain alert.