It's just a numbers game. There are suckers born every minute. There are an unbelievable number of accountants out there who couldn't put together these obvious signs.

A phone call from a stranger and an email from an account that has her name in it... it was probably [email protected]

It's easy to fake from address. So, it's going to be [email protected]

Agreed with my sibling post, that email would probably get flagged and dropped as spam before it got to the accountant.

I've seen an email like this aimed at the company I work for and it was something like [email protected] (just one letter was doubled from the real domain).

I think you both missed:

Conpany vs Company

Which just demonstrates how easy it is to get this past people.

PS: That or you where just assuming that was an error on my part ops. I did briefly correct it before realizing it was a better example.

If it was flagged as spam it would probably be due to a misconfiguration on the fraudster's end. There might be some anti-spam systems that might be looking for this now but I've yet to see it listed as a feature.

What major email service would allow that email to pass through into the accountant's inbox with no warning? I guess if you're stupid enough to transfer the money, you're stupid enough to ignore the warnings on the email.

This is a serious question just as a FYI.

Why would an email service know that conpany.com is a scam address of company.com? If they were spoofing addresses then it may be detected, but if they are using a valid domain with a random letter changed you are out of luck unless you have common sense and pay a lot of attention.

There are many things that can be done to prevent this and likely often are. I've set my mail client to color the subject line of messages differently if the from address is in my addressbook or not. However, I don't know how common it is for mail clients to do things like that by default so there may be many people who don't have any obvious sign that something is wrong.

ETA: I think some slight variations on the domain name could also be filtered out completely, but I'd guess it would be hard to catch all of those that it is difficult to visually detect without also filtering legitimate mail.

There is a huge cultural/generational component to it. There are some people who you just cannot wire to be suspicious. Either hire the right people or build security into your processes.