Fraud Warning to Local Charities
A message from the Guernsey Border Agency to Bailiwick charities:
The Guernsey Border Agency, Financial Intelligence Service (FIS) has identified that the bank accounts of a number of Guernsey registered charities have been subject to 'Attempted Fraudulent Transactions'. The FIS would therefore warn local charities to be vigilant when providing bank account information to third parties.
The method of this fraud is to obtain funds via Standing Order (SO) mandates set-up with the local charities registered bank account. However the SO requests have been identified as fraudulent and have not been requested by the charities registered signatories. In specific cases the details of the SO are inaccurate; contain misleading information and are not an original document (photocopy).
The fraudsters are possibly obtaining the details of the local bank account number and sort-code via open source searches on the internet. The FIS would therefore warn charities to be vigilant when passing any banking instructions or information to third parties and also check their bank accounts to ensure that no unauthorised standing orders have been set up (made).
Further information or advice can be obtained from the Guernsey Registry (743800) or from the Financial Intelligence Service (714081 or fiu@gba.gov.gg).
