A new phishing scam targets the bank accounts of transgender people.
Scammers steal identities and send fraudulent emails requesting changes to their payroll accounts.
SC Nealy, who runs LGBT+ Counseling Collaborative, wasn’t suspicious when opening an email from an employee reading, “Before the next payroll will be issued, I need to replace the account where my most recent deposit was made due to a bank change. What information is required?”
“My response was, yes, we can definitely do that. Please send me a voided check,” Nealy said. “And they responded back with their bank account information and the voided check, but it wasn’t actually my employee.”
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Nealy said the scammer had her fooled.
“I changed it in the payroll system to that, and then I happened to walk by my employee’s office and I mentioned, hey, I changed your information, and she had no idea what I was talking about. And that’s when I was like, oh, this is a problem,” Nealy said.
SK Smigiel, who has a large digital footprint as a nonbinary creator, was targeted as well. Smigiel’s employer received a fraudulent email requesting a payroll change. “I have recently opened a new account and would like to request that my payroll and all other related financial transactions be directed to this new account,” the email said.
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Smigiel works for a yoga studio and was immediately suspicious that an Instagram post gave the scammer the information they needed.
“Since the election, I’ve been doing a lot of discussion about trans rights and stuff, and my platform is very visible, so I was wondering how they were connected, but I had literally the day before just shared a post and tagged my studio in it on my story on Instagram, so I immediately had this connection that this person must have seen that,” Smigiel said.
Smigiel said a number of people have sent posts mentioning the scam. Some have lost money.
Smigiel and Nealy say the hate towards transgender people has soared exponentially since the election.
“And not just with the phishing emails,” Nealy said. “The fake consultation requests that aren’t actually real, the hate mail, things like that.”
The phishing email targeting Nealy’s employee was sent multiple times.
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