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Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Online scammers steal millions from CIBC T&T

by

Shane Superville
6 days ago
20250702
CIBC FirstCaribbean International Bank at Sun Plaza, Chaguanas.

CIBC FirstCaribbean International Bank at Sun Plaza, Chaguanas.

Scam­mers have conned the Cana­di­an Im­pe­r­i­al Bank of Com­merce (CIBC) Caribbean’s T&T op­er­a­tions of mil­lions of dol­lars, po­lice con­firmed yes­ter­day.

Po­lice re­vealed that in June, the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of CIBC Caribbean re­port­ed that he was au­tho­rised to trans­fer $14,811,094.06 from the bank’s sus­pense pro­cess­ing ac­count to oth­er ex­ter­nal ac­counts.

A sus­pense pro­cess­ing ac­count is de­scribed as a tem­po­rary hold­ing area for cash that can­not be clas­si­fied or prop­er­ly un­der­stood by a bank’s ac­count­ing sys­tem.

The man­ag­ing di­rec­tor re­port­ed­ly re­ceived au­tho­ri­sa­tion from the bank’s CEO via What­sApp and emails, prompt­ing him to ful­fil the trans­ac­tions. How­ev­er, fur­ther en­quiries—af­ter the trans­ac­tion was com­plet­ed—lat­er re­vealed that the CEO was un­aware of the trans­ac­tions.

A re­port was made to of­fi­cers of the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice’s Fraud Squad, who lat­er found there were 19 trans­ac­tions to ac­counts in Hong Kong, Sin­ga­pore and Bul­gar­ia.

Sources fur­ther dis­closed that sev­er­al of the ac­counts were even­tu­al­ly closed and mon­ey re­turned to the bank. How­ev­er, up to yes­ter­day, an es­ti­mat­ed $9.4 mil­lion re­mained un­ac­count­ed for.

Guardian Me­dia emailed ques­tions to CIBC, through their pub­lic re­la­tions agency, yes­ter­day, but they said they were “not pre­pared to com­ment” on the mat­ter.

The ques­tions sought to ver­i­fy the in­ci­dent, whether any of­fi­cials were sus­pend­ed fol­low­ing the re­port­ed fraud, the amount of mon­ey still un­ac­count­ed for, the com­pa­ny’s re­sponse and whether they would be in­tro­duc­ing ad­di­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty mech­a­nisms fol­low­ing the in­ci­dent.

Po­lice in­ves­ti­ga­tors yes­ter­day said while the mat­ter is still be­ing probed, it was pos­si­ble the fraud­sters may have used an elab­o­rate phish­ing scam to get per­son­al in­for­ma­tion and de­tails to car­ry out the scheme.

One of­fi­cer warned that such scam­ming tech­niques were be­com­ing more preva­lent against fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions.

Phish­ing is a prac­tice used by fraud­sters, where­by they pre­tend to be rep­utable in­di­vid­u­als or or­gan­i­sa­tions to get peo­ple to pro­duce per­son­al in­for­ma­tion like pass­words, bank ac­count num­bers or oth­er sen­si­tive da­ta that can be used to ac­cess mon­ey.

Con­tact­ed for com­ment on how such scams work yes­ter­day, Check­point Soft­ware Tech­nolo­gies se­cu­ri­ty en­gi­neer and ad­vi­sor Tra­vais Sookoo said there has been a grad­ual in­crease in the num­ber of cy­ber­at­tacks in the Caribbean since 2020 and part­ly at­trib­uted this uptick to the de­vel­op­ment of AI tools. He said while scams like ran­somware and phish­ing usu­al­ly took weeks and some­times months to ex­e­cute, the use of AI has in­creased cy­ber­at­tack­ers’ ef­fi­cien­cy.

“With the use of AI, it takes about 15 min­utes to cre­ate a stream of ran­somware. For some­one to do phish­ing be­fore, they would have to go and learn, look at the so­cial me­dia pro­files on dif­fer­ent plat­forms, cor­re­late that da­ta and build a mes­sage tar­get­ed to that end user. With AI that cuts it down sig­nif­i­cant­ly,” Sookoo said.

“AI can cut it down sig­nif­i­cant­ly and do analy­sis on a per­son with­in min­utes, so it’s not go­ing away and it will be even more tar­get­ed.”

He warned that the key el­e­ment to phish­ing in par­tic­u­lar was to get the would-be vic­tim to low­er their guard and click on links by trick­ing them in­to be­liev­ing they were le­git­i­mate rep­re­sen­ta­tives of a spe­cif­ic in­sti­tu­tion.

He said while AI has been used by crim­i­nals for scams, it can al­so be used by com­pa­nies like his own to de­vel­op de­fences and strength­en net­works.

But as scam­mers con­tin­ue to grow and adapt to new de­fences, Sookoo said an­oth­er valu­able de­fence for com­pa­nies would be to sharp­en the skills of em­ploy­ees in recog­nis­ing sus­pi­cious mes­sages or po­ten­tial tricks.

“It is hard, so the oth­er thing would be to aug­ment that with se­cu­ri­ty tools that would help in de­tect­ing and re­me­di­at­ing. In ad­di­tion to that user aware­ness, they should do phish­ing stim­u­la­tion ex­er­cis­es and this would not be at al­lo­cat­ed or spe­cif­ic times but at ran­dom,” Sookoo said.


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