Business email compromises, where fake emails are used to steal money from legitimate businesses, continue to top the investigation list of the Fiji Financial Intelligence Unit.

Director, Razim Buksh says the largest single transaction encountered by the Unit so far this year involved five hundred thousand Fijian dollars which was being diverted to a criminal’s account in Hong Kong.

“This happened by way of business email compromise scam where the sender of the email uses a look alike email and sends instructions to the bank to transfer funds abroad.”

Buksh says they were able to protect and safeguard the fund through the diligent work of the bank itself, reporting the matter to the Financial Intelligence Unit and the Unit’s close coordination with their foreign counterpart.

“So in this particular case the email account of the account holder was compromised and an instruction was sent to a local commercial bank and FJD500, 000 was stolen and transferred from the local bank account to a bank account in Hong Kong.”

Over the past nine months, the FIU has received five hundred suspicious transaction reports – twenty less compared to the same period last year.